g to--act absurdly, you know, do stop
me."

"I'm very sorry, but I've got myself to stop. Besides, I didn't undertake
to preserve the incognito of this bridal party."

If any accident of the sort dreaded had really happened, it would not
have mattered so much, for as yet they were the sole occupants of the
waiting room. To be sure, the ticket-seller was there, and the lady who
checked packages left in her charge, but these must have seen so many
endearments pass between passengers,--that a fleeting caress or so would
scarcely have drawn their notice to our pair. Yet Isabel did not so much
even as put her hand into her husband's; and as Basil afterwards said, it
was very good practice.

Our temporary state, whatever it is, is often mirrored in all that come
near us, and our friends were fated to meet frequent parodies of their
happiness from first to last on this journey. The travesty began with the
very first people who entered the waiting-room after themselves, and who
were a very young couple starting like themselves upon a pleasure tour,
which also was evidently one of the first tours of any kind that they had
made. It was of modest extent, and comprised going to New York and back;
but they talked of it with a fluttered and joyful expectation as if it
were a voyage to Europe. Presently there appeared a burlesque of their
happiness (but with a touch of tragedy) in that kind of young man who is
called by the females of his class a fellow, and two young women of that
kind known to him as girls. He took a place between these, and presently
began a robust flirtation with one of them. He possessed himself, after a
brief struggle, of her parasol, and twirled it about, as he uttered, with
a sort of tender rudeness inconceivable vapidities, such as you would
expect from none but a man of the highest fashion. The girl thus courted
became selfishly unconscious of everything but her own joy, and made no
attempt to bring the other girl within its warmth, but left her to
languish forgotten on the other side. The latter sometimes leaned
forward, and tried to divert a little of the flirtation to herself, but
the flirters snubbed her with short answers, and presently she gave up
and sat still in the sad patience of uncourted women. In this attitude
she became a burden to Isabel, who was glad when the three took
themselves away, and were succeeded by a very stylish couple--from New
York, she knew as well as if they had given her the