“Till she says go,” he added, “we’ve got to stay.”

“Oh yes,” his wife responded.  “The worst of it is, we can’t even go back to Tuskingum.”  He looked up suddenly at her, and she saw that he had not thought of this.  She made “Tchk!” in sheer amaze at him.

“We won’t cross that river till we come to it,” he said, sullenly, but half-ashamed.  The next morning the situation had not changed overnight, as they somehow both crazily hoped it might, and at breakfast, which they had at a table grown more remote from others with the thinning out of the winter guests of the hotel, the father and mother sat down alone in silence which was scarcely broken till Lottie and Boyne joined them.

“Where’s Ellen?” the boy demanded.

“She’s having her breakfast in her room,” Mrs. Kenton answered.

“She says she don’t want to eat anything,” Lottie reported.  “She made the man take it away again.”

The gloom deepened in the faces of the father and mother, but neither spoke, and Boyne resumed the word again in a tone of philosophic speculation.  “I don’t see how I’m going to get along, with those European breakfasts.  They say you can’t get anything but cold meat or eggs; and generally they don’t expect to give you anything but bread and butter with your coffee.  I don’t think that’s the way to start the day, do you, poppa?”

Kenton seemed not to have heard, for he went on silently eating, and the mother, who had not been appealed to, merely looked distractedly across the table at her children.

“Mr. Plumpton says he’s coming down to see us off,” said Lottie, smoothing her napkin in her lap.  “Do you know the time of day when the boat sails, momma?”

“Yes,” her brother broke in, “and if I had been momma I’d have boxed your ears for the way you went on with him.  You fairly teased him to come.  The way Lottie goes on with men is a shame, momma.”

“What time does the boat sail, momma!” Lottie blandly persisted.  “I promised to let Mr. Plumpton know.”

“Yes, so as to get a chance to write to him,” said Boyne.  “I guess when he sees your spelling!”

“Momma!  Do wake up!  What time does our steamer sail?”

A light of consciousness came into Mrs. Renton’s eyes at last, and she sighed gently.  “We’re not going, Lottie.”

“Not going!  Why, but we’ve got the tickets, and I’ve told—­”

“Your father has decided not to go, for the present.  We may go later in the summer, or perhaps in the fall.”

Boyne looked at his father’s troubled face, and said nothing, but Lottie was not stayed from the expression of her feelings by any ill-timed consideration for what her father’s might be.  “I just know,” she fired, “it’s something to do with that nasty Bittridge.  He’s been a bitter dose to this family!  As soon as I saw Ellen have a letter I was sure it was from him; and she ought to be ashamed.  If I had played the simpleton with such a fellow I guess you wouldn’t have let me keep you from going to Europe very much.  What is she going to do now?  Marry him?  Or doesn’t he want her to?”