“It’s been grand; it’s been perfect!  As German-Silver Wedding Journey it’s perfect—­it seems as if it had been ordered!  But I will never let you give up Holland!  No, we will go this afternoon, and when I get to Schevleningen, I’ll go to bed, and stay there, till you’ve completed your after-cure.”

“Do you think that will be wildly gay for the convalescent?”

She suddenly began to cry.  “Oh, dearest, what shall we do?  I feel perfectly broken down.  I’m afraid I’m going to be sick—­and away from home!  How could you ever let me overdo, so?” She put her handkerchief to her eyes, and turned her face into the sofa pillow.

This was rather hard upon him, whom her vivid energy and inextinguishable interest had not permitted a moment’s respite from pleasure since they left Carlsbad.  But he had been married, too long not to understand that her blame of him was only a form of self-reproach for her own self-forgetfulness.  She had not remembered that she was no longer young till she had come to what he saw was a nervous collapse.  The fact had its pathos and its poetry which no one could have felt more keenly than he.  If it also had its inconvenience and its danger he realized these too.

“Isabel,” he said, “we are going home.”

“Very well, then it will be your doing.”

“Quite.  Do you think you could stand it as far as Cologne?  We get the sleeping-car there, and you can lie down the rest of the way to Ostend.”

“This afternoon?  Why I’m perfectly strong; it’s merely my nerves that are gone.”  She sat up, and wiped her eyes.  “But Basil!  If you’re doing this for me—­”

“I’m doing it for myself,” said March, as he went out of the room.

She stood the journey perfectly well, and in the passage to Dover she suffered so little from the rough weather that she was an example to many robust matrons who filled the ladies’ cabin with the noise of their anguish during the night.  She would have insisted upon taking the first train up to London, if March had not represented that this would not expedite the sailing of the Cupania, and that she might as well stay the forenoon at the convenient railway hotel, and rest.  It was not quite his ideal of repose that the first people they saw in the coffee-room when they went to breakfast should be Kenby and Rose Adding, who were having their tea and toast and eggs together in the greatest apparent good-fellowship.  He saw his wife shrink back involuntarily from the encounter, but this was only to gather force for it; and the next moment she was upon them in all the joy of the surprise.  Then March allowed himself to be as glad as the others both seemed, and he shook hands with Kenby while his wife kissed Rose; and they all talked at once.  In the confusion of tongues it was presently intelligible that Mrs. Kenby was going to be down in a few minutes; and Kenby took March into his confidence with a smile which was, almost a wink in explaining that he knew