“That’s it!  Don’t you think I had a right to there being something in it, after all I did for her?”

“I always hoped you hadn’t done anything for her, but if you have, why should she give herself away on paper?  It’s a very proper letter.”

“It’s a little too proper, and it’s the last I shall have to do with her.  She knew that I should be on pins and needles till I heard how her father had taken Burnamy’s being there, that night, and she doesn’t say a word about it.”

“The general may have had a tantrum that she couldn’t describe.  Perhaps she hasn’t told him, yet.”

“She would tell him instantly!” cried Mrs. March who began to find reason in the supposition, as well as comfort for the hurt which the girl’s reticence had given her.  “Or if she wouldn’t, it would be because she was waiting for the best chance.”

“That would be like the wise daughter of a difficult father.  She may be waiting for the best chance to say how he took it.  No, I’m all for Miss Triscoe, and I hope that now, if she’s taken herself off our hands, she’ll keep off.”

“It’s altogether likely that he’s made her promise not to tell me anything about it,” Mrs. March mused aloud.

“That would be unjust to a person who had behaved so discreetly as you have,” said her husband.

They were on their way to Wurzburg, and at the first station, which was a junction, a lady mounted to their compartment just before the train began to move.  She was stout and middle-aged, and had never been pretty, but she bore herself with a kind of authority in spite of her thread gloves, her dowdy gray travelling-dress, and a hat of lower middle-class English tastelessness.  She took the only seat vacant, a backward-riding place beside a sleeping passenger who looked like a commercial traveller, but she seemed ill at ease in it, and March offered her his seat.  She accepted it very promptly, and thanked him for it in the English of a German, and Mrs. March now classed her as a governess who had been teaching in England and had acquired the national feeling for dress.  But in this character she found her interesting, and even a little pathetic, and she made her some overtures of talk which the other met eagerly enough.  They were now running among low hills, not so picturesque as those between Eger and Nuremberg, but of much the same toylike quaintness in the villages dropped here and there in their valleys.  One small town, completely walled, with its gray houses and red roofs, showed through the green of its trees and gardens so like a colored print in a child’s story-book that Mrs. March cried out for joy in it, and then accounted for her rapture by explaining to the stranger that they were Americans and had never been in Germany before.  The lady was not visibly affected by the fact, she said casually that she had often been in that little town, which she named; her uncle had a castle in the country back of it, and