“No; but I don’t know but I shall go.”

“Hello, Mavering!” said Mr. Brinkley, coming up and taking his hand into his fat grasp.  “On your way to Fortress Monroe?  Better come with us.  Why; Munt!”

He turned to greet this other Bostonian, who had hardly expressed his joy at meeting with his fellow-townsmen when the hostess rustled softly up, and said, with the irony more or less friendly, which everybody uses in speaking of Boston, or recognising the intellectual pre-eminence of its people, “I’m not going to let you keep this feast of reason all to your selves.  I want you to leaven the whole lump,” and she began to disperse them, and to introduce them about right and left.

Dan tried to find his Virginian again, but she was gone.  He found Miss Anderson; she was with her aunt.  “Shall we be tearing you away?” she asked.

“Oh no.  I’m quite ready to go.”

His nerves were in a tremble.  Those Boston faces and voices had brought it all back again; it seemed as if he had met Alice.  He was silent and incoherent as they drove home, but Miss Anderson apparently did not want to talk much, and apparently did not notice his reticence.

He fell asleep with the pang in his heart which had been there so often.

When Dan came down to breakfast he found the Brinkleys at a pleasant place by one of the windows, and after they had exchanged a pleased surprise with him that they should all happen to be in the same hotel, they asked him to sit at their table.

There was a bright sun shining, and the ache was gone out of Dan’s heart.  He began to chatter gaily with Mrs. Brinkley about Washington.

“Oh, better come on to Fortress Monroe,” said her husband.  “Better come on with us.”

“No, I can’t just yet,” said Dan.  “I’ve got some business here that will keep me for awhile.  Perhaps I may run down there a little later.”

“Miss Anderson seems to have a good deal of business in Washington too,” observed Brinkley, with some hazy notion of saying a pleasant rallying thing to the young man.  He wondered at the glare his wife gave him.  With those panned oysters before him he had forgotten all about Dan’s love affair with Miss Pasmer.

Mrs. Brinkley hastened to make the mention of Miss Anderson as impersonal as possible.

“It was so nice to meet her again.  She is such an honest, wholesome creature, and so bright and full of sense.  She always made me think of the broad daylight.  I always liked that girl.”

“Yes; isn’t she jolly?” said Dan joyously.  “She seems to know everybody here.  It’s a great piece of luck for me.  They’re going to take a house in Washington next winter.”

“Yes; I know that stage,” said Mrs. Brinkley.  “Her aunt’s an amusingly New-York respectability.  I don’t think you’d find just such Miss Mitford curls as hers in all Boston.”

“Yes, they are like the portraits, aren’t they?” said Dan; delighted.  “She’s very nice, don’t you think?”