perfectly where I must go. Mr. Wentworth informs me that the carriage is always at my disposal, and Charlotte offers to go with me, in a pair of tight gloves and a very stiff petticoat. And yet for three days I have been putting it off. They must think me horribly vicious.”

“You ask me to apologize,” said Acton, “but you don’t tell me what excuse I can offer.”

“That is more,” the Baroness declared, “than I am held to. It would be like my asking you to buy me a bouquet and giving you the money. I have no reason except that—somehow—it’s too violent an effort. It is not inspiring. Wouldn’t that serve as an excuse, in Boston? I am told they are very sincere; they don’t tell fibs. And then Felix ought to go with me, and he is never in readiness. I don’t see him. He is always roaming about the fields and sketching old barns, or taking ten-mile walks, or painting someone’s portrait, or rowing on the pond, or flirting with Gertrude Wentworth.”

“I should think it would amuse you to go and see a few people,” said Acton. “You are having a very quiet time of it here. It’s a dull life for you.”

“Ah, the quiet,—the quiet!” the Baroness exclaimed. “That’s what I like. It’s rest. That’s what I came here for. Amusement? I have had amusement. And as for seeing people—I have already seen a great many in my life. If it didn’t sound ungracious I should say that I wish very humbly your people here would leave me alone!”

Acton looked at her a moment, and she looked at him. She was a woman who took being looked at remarkably well. “So you have come here for rest?” he asked.

“So I may say. I came for many of those reasons that are no reasons—don’t you know?—and yet that are really the best: to come away, to change, to break with everything. When once one comes away one must arrive somewhere, and I asked myself why I shouldn’t arrive here.”

“You certainly had time on the way!” said Acton, laughing.

Madame Münster looked at him again; and then, smiling: “And I have certainly had time, since I got here, to ask myself why I came. However, I never ask myself idle questions. Here I am, and it seems to me you ought only to thank me.”

“When you go away you will see the difficulties I shall put in your path.”

“You mean to put difficulties in my path?” she asked, rearranging the rosebud in her corsage.

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