“Oh, yes!  Well, that’s good!”

“No, it isn’t!  Don’t say such a thing—­till you know!” she cried, with a certain shrillness which warned him of an unfathomed seriousness in the fact.  He sat up as if better to confront the mystery.  “I have been at her hotel, and she has been telling me that she’s just come from Berlin, and that Mr. Kenby’s been there, and—­Now I won’t have you making a joke of it, or breaking out about it, as if it were not a thing to be looked for; though of course with the others on our hands you’re not to blame for not thinking of it.  But you can see yourself that she’s young and good-looking.  She did speak beautifully of her son, and if it were not for him, I don’t believe she would hesitate—­”

“For heaven’s sake, what are you driving at?” March broke in, and she answered him as vehemently: 

“He’s asked her to marry him!”

“Kenby?  Mrs. Adding?”

“Yes!”

“Well, now, Isabel, this won’t do!  They ought to be ashamed of themselves.  With that morbid, sensitive boy!  It’s shocking—­”

“Will you listen?  Or do you want me to stop?” He arrested himself at her threat, and she resumed, after giving her contempt of his turbulence time to sink in, “She refused him, of course!”

“Oh, all right, then!”

“You take it in such a way that I’ve a great mind not to tell you anything more about it.”

“I know you have,” he said, stretching himself out again; “but you’ll do it, all the same.  You’d have been awfully disappointed if I had been calm and collected.”

“She refused him,” she began again, “although she respects him, because she feels that she ought to devote herself to her son.  Of course she’s very young, still; she was married when she was only nineteen to a man twice her age, and she’s not thirty-five yet.  I don’t think she ever cared much for her husband; and she wants you to find out something about him.”

“I never heard of him.  I—­”

Mrs. March made a “tchck!” that would have recalled the most consequent of men from the most logical and coherent interpretation to the true intent of her words.  He perceived his mistake, and said, resolutely:  “Well, I won’t do it.  If she’s refused him, that’s the end of it; she needn’t know anything about him, and she has no right to.”

“Now I think differently,” said Mrs. March, with an inductive air.  “Of course she has to know about him, now.”  She stopped, and March turned his head and looked expectantly at her.  “He said he would not consider her answer final, but would hope to see her again and—­She’s afraid he may follow her—­What are you looking at me so for?”

“Is he coming here?”

“Am I to blame if he is?  He said he was going to write to her.”

March burst into a laugh.  “Well, they haven’t been beating about the bush!  When I think how Miss Triscoe has been pursuing Burnamy from the first moment she set eyes on him, with the settled belief that she was running from him, and he imagines that he has been boldly following her, without the least hope from her, I can’t help admiring the simple directness of these elders.”