“Yes; I hope Alice isn’t overdoing.”

“I’m afraid you’re dreadfully tired,” said Mavering to the girl, in a low voice, as he lifted her from her place when they reached the hotel through the provisional darkness, and found that after all it was only dinner-time.

“Oh no.  I feel as if the picnic were just beginning.”

“Then you will come to-night?”

“I will see what mamma says.”

“Shall I ask her?”

“Oh, perhaps not,” said the girl, repressing his ardour, but not severely.

XVIII.

They were going to have some theatricals at one of the cottages, and the lady at whose house they were to be given made haste to invite all the picnic party before it dispersed.  Mrs. Pasmer accepted with a mental reservation, meaning to send an excuse later if she chose; and before she decided the point she kept her husband from going after dinner into the reading-room, where he spent nearly all his time over a paper and a cigar, or in sitting absolutely silent and unoccupied, and made him go to their own room with her.

“There is something that I must speak to you about,” she said, closing the door, “and you must decide for yourself whether you wish to let it go any further.”

“What go any further?” asked Mr. Pasmer, sitting down and putting his hand to the pocket that held his cigar-case with the same series of motions.

“No, don’t smoke,” she said, staying his hand impatiently.  “I want you to think.”

“How can I think if I don’t smoke?”

“Very well; smoke, then.  Do you want this affair with young Mavering to go any farther?”

“Oh!” said Pasmer, “I thought you had been looking after that.”  He had in fact relegated that to the company of the great questions exterior to his personal comfort which she always decided.

“I have been looking after it, but now the time has come when you must, as a father, take some interest in it.”

Pasmer’s noble mask of a face, from the point of his full white beard to his fine forehead, crossed by his impressive black eyebrows, expressed all the dignified concern which a father ought to feel in such an affair; but what he was really feeling was a grave reluctance to have to intervene in any way.  “What do you want me to say to him?” he asked.

“Why, I don’t know that he’s going to ask you anything.  I don’t know whether he’s said anything to Alice yet,” said Mrs. Pasmer, with some exasperation.

Her husband was silent, but his silence insinuated a degree of wonder that she should approach him prematurely on such a point.

“They have been thrown together all day, and there is no use to conceal from ourselves that they are very much taken with each other?”

“I thought,” Pasmer said, “that you said that from the beginning.  Didn’t you want them to be taken with each other?”