on silently, his
heart filled with unsatisfied yearning, she rallied him mischievously.
Was it kind in him on this, their first day together, to sulk in this
fashion? Was it a promise for their future excursions? Did he intend
to carry this lugubrious visage through the Allee and up to the
courtyard of the hotel to proclaim his sentimental condition to the
world? At least, she trusted he would not show it to Milly, who might
remember that this was only the SECOND TIME they had met each other.
There was something so sweetly reasonable in this, and withal not
without a certain hopefulness for the future, to say nothing of the
half-mischievous, half-reproachful smile that accompanied it, that Paul
exerted himself, and eventually recovered his lost gayety. When they
at last drew up in the courtyard, with the flush of youth and exercise
in their faces, Paul felt he was the object of envy to the loungers,
and of fresh gossip to Strudle Bad. It struck him less pleasantly that
two dark faces, which had been previously regarding him in the gloom of
the corridor and vanished as he approached, reappeared some moments
later in Yerba's salon as Don Caesar and Dona Anna, with a benignly
different expression. Dona Anna especially greeted him with so much of
the ostentatious archness of a confident and forgiving woman to a
momentarily recreant lover, that he felt absurdly embarrassed in
Yerba's presence. He was thinking how he could excuse himself, when he
noticed a beautiful basket of flowers on the table and a tiny note
bearing a baron's crest. Yerba had put it aside with--as it seemed to
him at the moment--an almost too pronounced indifference--and an
indifference that was strongly contrasted to Dona Anna's eagerly
expressed enthusiasm over the offering, and her ultimate supplications
to Paul and her brother to admire its beauties and the wonderful taste
of the donor.

All this seemed so incongruous with Paul's feelings, and above all with
the recollection of his scene with Yerba, that he excused himself from
dining with the party, alleging an engagement with his old
fellow-traveler the German officer, whose acquaintance he had renewed.
Yerba did not press him; he even fancied she looked relieved. Colonel
Pendleton was coming; Paul was not loath, in his present frame of mind,
to dispense with his company. A conviction that the colonel's counsel
was not the best guide for Yerba, and that in some vague way their
interests