“Say something,” said his wife.  “What are you thinking about?”

“Oh, Burnamy,” he answered, honestly enough.

“I was thinking about the children,” she said.  “I am glad Bella didn’t try to come from Chicago to see us off; it would have been too silly; she is getting to be very sensible.  I hope Tom won’t take the covers off the furniture when he has the fellows in to see him.”

“Well, I want him to get all the comfort he can out of the place, even if the moths eat up every stick of furniture.”

“Yes, so do I. And of course you’re wishing that you were there with him!” March laughed guiltily.  “Well, perhaps it was a crazy thing for us to start off alone for Europe, at our age.”

“Nothing of the kind,” he retorted in the necessity he perceived for staying her drooping spirits.  “I wouldn’t be anywhere else on any account.  Isn’t it perfectly delicious?  It puts me in mind of that night on the Lake Ontario boat, when we were starting for Montreal.  There was the same sort of red sunset, and the air wasn’t a bit softer than this.”

He spoke of a night on their wedding-journey when they were sill new enough from Europe to be comparing everything at home with things there.

“Well, perhaps we shall get into the spirit of it again,” she said, and they talked a long time of the past.

All the mechanical noises were muffled in the dull air, and the wash of the ship’s course through the waveless sea made itself pleasantly heard.  In the offing a steamer homeward bound swam smoothly by, so close that her lights outlined her to the eye; she sent up some signal rockets that soared against the purple heaven in green and crimson, and spoke to the Norumbia in the mysterious mute phrases of ships that meet in the dark.

Mrs. March wondered what had become of Burnamy; the promenades were much freer now than they had been since the ship sailed; when she rose to go below, she caught sight of Burnamy walking the deck transversely with some lady.  She clutched her husband’s arm and stayed him in rich conjecture.

“Do you suppose he can have got her to walking with him already?”

They waited till Burnamy and his companion came in sight again.  She was tilting forward, and turning from the waist, now to him and now from him.

“No; it’s that pivotal girl,” said March; and his wife said, “Well, I’m glad he won’t be put down by them.”

In the music-room sat the people she meant, and at the instant she passed on down the stairs, the daughter was saying to the father, “I don’t see why you didn’t tell me sooner, papa.”

“It was such an unimportant matter that I didn’t think to mention it.  He offered it, and I took it; that was all.  What difference could it have made to you?”

“None.  But one doesn’t like to do any one an injustice.”

“I didn’t know you were thinking anything about it.”

“No, of course not.”