Boyne stole an ashamed look at his mother, and his father said, with an unbending to Breckon which must have been the effect of severe expostulation from Mrs. Kenton, “I suppose you and the ladies will go to Paris together.”

“Why, no,” Breckon said, and he added, with mounting confusion, “I—­I had arranged to keep on to Rotterdam.  I was going to mention it.”

“Keep on to Rotterdam!” Mrs. Rasmith’s eyes expressed the greatest astonishment.

“Why, of course, mother!” said her daughter.  “Don’t you know?  Boyne told us.”

Boyne, after their parting, seized the first chance of assuring his mother that he had not told Miss Rasmith that, for he had not known it, and he went so far in her condemnation to wonder how she could say such a thing.  His mother said it was not very nice, and then suggested that perhaps she had heard it from some one else, and thought it was he.  She acquitted him of complicity with Miss Rasmith in forbearing to contradict her; and it seemed to her a fitting time to find out from Boyne what she honestly could about the relation of the Rasmiths to Mr. Breckon.  It was very little beyond their supposition, which every one else had shared, that he was going to land with them at Boulogne, and he must have changed his mind very suddenly.  Boyne had not heard the Rasmiths speak of it.  Miss Rasmith never spoke of Mr. Breckon at all; but she seemed to want to talk of Ellen; she was always asking about her, and what was the matter with her, and how long she had been sick.

“Boyne,” said his mother, with a pang, “you didn’t tell her anything about Ellen?”

“Momma!” said the boy, in such evident abhorrence of the idea that she rested tranquil concerning it.  She paid little attention to what Boyne told her otherwise of the Rasmiths.  Her own horizon were so limited that she could not have brought home to herself within them that wandering life the Rasmiths led from climate to climate and sensation to sensation, with no stay so long as the annually made in New York, where they sometimes passed months enough to establish themselves in giving and taking tea in a circle of kindred nomads.  She conjectured as ignorantly as Boyne himself that they were very rich, and it would not have enlightened her to know that the mother was the widow of a California politician, whom she had married in the sort of middle period following upon her less mortuary survival of Miss Rasmith’s father, whose name was not Rasmith.

What Mrs. Kenton divined was that they had wanted to get Breckon, and that so far as concerned her own interest in him they had wanted to get him away from Ellen.  In her innermost self-confidences she did not permit herself the notion that Ellen had any right to him; but still it was a relief to have them off the ship, and to have him left.  Of all the witnesses of the fact, she alone did not find it awkward.  Breckon himself found it very awkward.  He did