bridegroom who sees the bride, that he no longer looks at except with distaste and estrangement, coming nearer and nearer to him up the aisle!  A funeral march would be gayer than that music, I should think!  The thought came to me to break out bluntly and say to him:  “Countermand the cake!  She’s only playing with you while that yachtsman is making up his mind.”  But there could be but one outcome of such advice to John Mayrant:  two people, instead of one, would be in bed suffering from contusions.  As I mused on the boy and his attractive and appealing character, I became more rejoiced than ever that he had thrashed somebody, I cared not very much who nor yet very much why, so long as such thrashing had been thorough, which seemed quite evidently and happily the case.  He stood now in my eyes, in some way that is too obscure for me to be able to explain to you, saved from some reproach whose subtlety likewise eludes my powers of analysis.

It was already five minutes after three o’clock, my dinner hour, when he at length appeared in the Library; and possibly I put some reproach into my greeting:  “Won’t you walk along with me to Mrs. Trevise’s?” (That was my boarding house.)

“I could not get away from the Custom House sooner,” he explained; and into his eyes there came for a moment that look of unrest and preoccupation which I had observed at times while we had discussed Newport and alcoholic girls.  The two subjects seemed certainly far enough apart!  But he immediately began upon a conversation briskly enough—­so briskly that I suspected at once he had got his subject ready in advance; he didn’t want me to speak first, lest I turn the talk into channels embarrassing, such as bruised foreheads or wedding cake.  Well, this should not prevent me from dropping in his cup the wholesome bitters which I had prepared.

“Well, sir!  Well, sir!” such was his hearty preface.  “I wonder if you’re feeling ashamed of yourself?”

“Never when I read Shakespeare,” I answered restoring the plume to its place.

He looked at the title.  “Which one?”

“One of the unsuitable love affairs that was prevented in time.”

“Romeo and Juliet?”

“No; Bottom and Titania—­and Romeo and Juliet were not prevented in time.  They had their bliss once and to the full, and died before they caused each other anything but ecstasy.  No weariness of routine, no tears of disenchantment; complete love, completely realized—­and finis!  It’s the happiest ending of all the plays.”

He looked at me hard.  “Sometimes I believe you’re ironic!”

I smiled at him.  “A sign of the highest civilization, then.  But please to think of Juliet after ten years of Romeo and his pin-headed intelligence and his preordained infidelities.  Do you imagine that her predecessor, Rosamond, would have had no successors?  Juliet would have been compelled to divorce Romeo, if only for the children’s sake.