A maid came out upon the piazza who wanted something.  Mrs. Burton half rose, but her daughter forestalled her.  “I will go,” said she.  “Excuse me one minute.”

If my face expressed the sentiment, “Oh, that the mother had gone!” I did not intend that it should do so.  Mrs. Burton then began to talk about her daughter.

“She is like her father,” she said, “in so many ways.  For one thing, she is very fond of school-masters.  I do not know exactly why this should be, but her teachers always seem to be her friends.  In fact, she is to marry a school-master—­that is, an assistant professor at Yale.  He is in Europe now, but we expect him back early in the fall.”

A short time after this, when the daughter had returned and I rose to go, the young girl put her soft, white hand into mine exactly as she had done when I arrived, and the light in her eyes showed me, just as it had showed me before, the pleasure she had taken in my visit.  But the mother’s farewell was different from her greeting.  I could see in her kind air a certain considerate sympathy which was not there before.  She had been very prompt to tell me of her daughter’s engagement.

That young angel of peace and truth would not have deemed it necessary to say a word about the matter, even to a young man who was a school-master, and between whom and her family a mutual interest was rapidly growing.  But with the mother it was otherwise.  She had seen the shadows pass away from my countenance as I sat and talked upon that cool piazza, my eyes bent upon her daughter.  Mothers know.

CHAPTER XX

BACK FROM CATHAY

The next morning, being again settled in my rooms in Walford, I went to call upon the Doctor and his daughter.  The Doctor was not at home, but his daughter was glad to see me.

“And how do you like your cycle of Cathay?” she asked.

“I do not like it at all,” I answered.  “It has taken me upon a dreary round.  I am going to change it for another as soon as I have an opportunity.”

“Then it has not been a wheel of fortune to you?” she remarked.  “And as for that country which you figuratively called Cathay, did you find that pleasant?”

“In some ways, yes, but in others not.  You see, I came back before my vacation was over, and I do not care to go there any more.”

She now wanted me to tell her where I had really been and what had happened to me, and I gave her a sketch of my adventures.  Of course I could not enter deeply into particulars, for that would make too long a story, but I told her where I had stopped, and my accounts of the bear and the horse were deeply interesting.

“It seems to me,” she said, when I had finished, “that if things had been a little different, you might have had an extremely pleasant tour.  For instance, if Mr. Godfrey Chester had been living, I think you would have liked him very much, and it is probable that you would have been glad to stay at his inn for several days.  It is a beautiful country thereabout.”