ess. In front and keeping just a little beyond the range of his
intervention, Sir Richmond would go with Miss Grammont; he himself and
Miss Seyffert would bring up the rear. "If I do," he muttered, "I'll be
damned!" an unusually strong expression for him.

"You said--?" asked Miss Seyffert.

"That I have some writing to do--before the post goes," said the doctor
brightly.

"Oh! come and see the cathedral!" cried Sir Richmond with ill-concealed
dismay. He was, if one may put it in such a fashion, not looking at Miss
Seyffert in the directest fashion when he said this.

"I'm afraid," said the doctor mulishly. "Impossible."

(With the unspoken addition of, "You try her for a bit.")

Miss Grammont stood up. Everybody stood up. "We can go first to look
for shops," she said. "There's those things you want to buy, Belinda;
a fountain pen and the little books. We can all go together as far as
that. And while you are shopping, if you wouldn't mind getting one or
two things for me...."

It became clear to Dr. Martineau that Sir Richmond was to be let off
Belinda. It seemed abominably unjust. And it was also clear to him that
he must keep closely to his own room or he might find Miss Seyffert
drifting back alone to the hotel and eager to resume with him....

Well, a quiet time in his room would not be disagreeable. He could think
over his notes....

But in reality he thought over nothing but the little speeches he would
presently make to Sir Richmond about the unwarrantable, the absolutely
unwarrantable, alterations that were being made without his consent in
their common programme....

For a long time Sir Richmond had met no one so interesting and amusing
as this frank-minded young woman from America. "Young woman" was how he
thought of her; she didn't correspond to anything so prim and restrained
and extensively reserved and withheld as a "young lady "; and though
he judged her no older than five and twenty, the word "girl" with its
associations of virginal ignorances, invisible purdah, and trite ideas
newly discovered, seemed even less appropriate for her than the word
"boy." She had an air of having in some obscure way graduated in life,
as if so far she had lived each several year of her existence in a
distinctive and conclusive manner with the utmost mental profit and no
particular tarnish or injury. He could talk with her as if he talked
with a man like himself--but with a zest no man could give him.

It was ev