pleasant--if you could believe in it,"
he said, as the train smoothly rolled out of the station. "But of course
it can't be genuine. There must be some dodge about it. I've no doubt
you'll begin to feel perfectly horrid, the first thing you know."

Mrs. Kenton let him go on, as he did at some length, and began to
drowse, while he amused himself with a gross parody of things she had
said during the past four days. In those years while their wedded bliss
was yet practically new, Colonel Kenton found his wife an inexhaustible
source of mental refreshment. He prized beyond measure the feminine
inadequacy and excess of her sayings; he had stored away such a variety
of these that he was able to talk her personal parlance for an hour
together; indeed, he had learned the trick of inventing phrases so much
in her manner that Mrs. Kenton never felt quite safe in disowning any
monstrous thing attributed to her. Her drowse now became a little nap,
and presently a delicious doze, in which she drifted far away from
actual circumstance into a realm where she seemed to exist as a mere
airy thought of her physical self; suddenly she lost this thought, and
slept through all stops at stations and all changes of the hot-water
cylinder, to renew which the guard, faithful to Colonel Kenton's bribe,
alone opened the door.

"Wake up, Bessie!" she heard her husband saying. "We're at Vienna."

It seemed very improbable, but she did not dispute it. "What time is
it?" she asked, as she suffered herself to be lifted from the carriage
into the keen air of the winter night.

"Three o'clock," said the colonel, hurrying her into the waiting-room,
where she sat, still somewhat remote from herself but getting nearer and
nearer, while he went off about the baggage. "Now, then!" he cried
cheerfully when he returned; and he led his wife out and put her into a
_fiacre_. The driver bent from his perch and arrested the colonel, as he
was getting in after Mrs. Kenton, with words in themselves
unintelligible, but so probably in demand for neglected instructions
that the colonel said, "Oh! Kaiserin Elisabeth!" and again bowed his
head towards the fiacre door, when the driver addressed further speech
to him, so diffuse and so presumably unnecessary that Colonel Kenton
merely repeated, with rising impatience, "Kaiserin Elisabeth,--Kaiserin
Elisabeth, I tell you!" and getting in shut the fiacre door after him.

The driver remained a moment in mumbled soliloquy;