ness of his captors from the tone in
which, over the asparagus from Florida, they were dealing with Beaufort
and his wife. "It's to show me," he thought, "what would happen to
ME--" and a deathly sense of the superiority of implication and analogy
over direct action, and of silence over rash words, closed in on him
like the doors of the family vault.

He laughed, and met Mrs. van der Luyden's startled eyes.

"You think it laughable?" she said with a pinched smile. "Of course
poor Regina's idea of remaining in New York has its ridiculous side, I
suppose;" and Archer muttered: "Of course."

At this point, he became conscious that Madame Olenska's other
neighbour had been engaged for some time with the lady on his right.
At the same moment he saw that May, serenely enthroned between Mr. van
der Luyden and Mr. Selfridge Merry, had cast a quick glance down the
table. It was evident that the host and the lady on his right could
not sit through the whole meal in silence. He turned to Madame
Olenska, and her pale smile met him. "Oh, do let's see it through," it
seemed to say.

"Did you find the journey tiring?" he asked in a voice that surprised
him by its naturalness; and she answered that, on the contrary, she had
seldom travelled with fewer discomforts.

"Except, you know, the dreadful heat in the train," she added; and he
remarked that she would not suffer from that particular hardship in the
country she was going to.

"I never," he declared with intensity, "was more nearly frozen than
once, in April, in the train between Calais and Paris."

She said she did not wonder, but remarked that, after all, one could
always carry an extra rug, and that every form of travel had its
hardships; to which he abruptly returned that he thought them all of no
account compared with the blessedness of getting away. She changed
colour, and he added, his voice suddenly rising in pitch: "I mean to
do a lot of travelling myself before long." A tremor crossed her face,
and leaning over to Reggie Chivers, he cried out: "I say, Reggie, what
do you say to a trip round the world: now, next month, I mean? I'm
game if you are--" at which Mrs. Reggie piped up that she could not
think of letting Reggie go till after the Martha Washington Ball she
was getting up for the Blind Asylum in Easter week; and her husband
placidly observed that by that time he would have to be practising for
the International Polo match.

But Mr. Selfridge Me