your views."

"My views, Miss Prance? I am sure I have never mentioned them to you!"
Then Ransom added, "How is Miss Tarrant to-day? is she more calm?"

"Oh no, she isn't calm at all," Doctor Prance answered, very definitely.

"Do you mean she's excited, emotional?"

"Well, she doesn't talk, she's perfectly still, and so is Miss
Chancellor. They're as still as two watchers--they don't speak. But you
can hear the silence vibrate."

"Vibrate?"

"Well, they are very nervous."

Ransom was confident, as I say, yet the effort that he made to extract a
good omen from this characterisation of the two ladies at the cottage
was not altogether successful. He would have liked to ask Doctor Prance
whether she didn't think he might count on Verena in the end; but he was
too shy for this, the subject of his relations with Miss Tarrant never
yet having been touched upon between them; and, besides, he didn't care
to hear himself put a question which was more or less an implication of
a doubt. So he compromised, with a sort of oblique and general inquiry
about Olive; that might draw some light. "What do you think of Miss
Chancellor--how does she strike you?"

Doctor Prance reflected a little, with an apparent consciousness that he
meant more than he asked. "Well, she's losing flesh," she presently
replied; and Ransom turned away, not encouraged, and feeling that, no
doubt, the little doctress had better go back to her office-slate.

He did the thing handsomely, remained at Provincetown a week, inhaling
the delicious air, smoking innumerable cigars, and lounging among the
ancient wharves, where the grass grew thick and the impression of fallen
greatness was still stronger than at Marmion. Like his friends the
Bostonians he was very nervous; there were days when he felt he must
rush back to the margin of that mild inlet; the voices of the air
whispered to him that in his absence he was being outwitted.
Nevertheless he stayed the time he had determined to stay; quieting
himself with the reflexion that there was nothing they could do to elude
him unless, perhaps, they should start again for Europe, which they were
not likely to do. If Miss Olive tried to hide Verena away in the United
States he would undertake to find her--though he was obliged to confess
that a flight to Europe would baffle him, owing to his want of cash for
pursuit. Nothing, however, was less probable than that they would cross
the Atlantic on the eve of Verena's