March smiled gravely, and his smile was not lost upon Kenby.  “You mean the boy,” he said.  “Well, I like Rose,” and now March really felt swept from his feet.  “She doesn’t deny that she likes me, but she seems to think that her marrying again will take her from him; the fact is, it will only give me to him.  As for devoting her whole life to him, she couldn’t do a worse thing for him.  What the boy needs is a man’s care, and a man’s will—­Good heavens!  You don’t think I could ever be unkind to the little soul?” Kenby threw himself forward over the table.

“My dear fellow!” March protested.

“I’d rather cut off my right hand!” Kenby pursued, excitedly, and then he said, with a humorous drop:  “The fact is, I don’t believe I should want her so much if I couldn’t have Rose too.  I want to have them both.  So far, I’ve only got no for an answer; but I’m not going to keep it.  I had a letter from Rose at Carlsbad, the other day; and—­”

The waiter came forward with a folded scrap of paper on his salver, which March knew must be from his wife.  “What is keeping you so?” she wrote.  “I am all ready.”  “It’s from Mrs. March,” he explained to Kenby.  “I am going out with her on some errands.  I’m awfully glad to see you again.  We must talk it all over, and you must—­you mustn’t—­Mrs. March will want to see you later—­I—­Are you in the hotel?”

“Oh yes.  I’ll see you at the one-o’clock table d’hote, I suppose.”

March went away with his head whirling in the question whether he should tell his wife at once of Kenby’s presence, or leave her free for the pleasures of Wurzburg, till he could shape the fact into some safe and acceptable form.  She met him at the door with her guide-books, wraps and umbrellas, and would hardly give him time to get on his hat and coat.

“Now, I want you to avoid the Stollers as far as you can see them.  This is to be a real wedding-journey day, with no extraneous acquaintance to bother; the more strangers the better.  Wurzburg is richer than anything I imagined.  I’ve looked it all up; I’ve got the plan of the city, so that we can easily find the way.  We’ll walk first, and take carriages whenever we get tired.  We’ll go to the cathedral at once; I want a good gulp of rococo to begin with; there wasn’t half enough of it at Ansbach.  Isn’t it strange how we’ve come round to it?”

She referred to that passion for the Gothic which they had obediently imbibed from Ruskin in the days of their early Italian travel and courtship, when all the English-speaking world bowed down to him in devout aversion from the renaissance, and pious abhorrence of the rococo.