ried
couple whom they knew came by, arm in arm, in their morning walk, and sat
down with them, like their own youth, for a moment.

"If you had told them we were going, dear," said Mrs. March, when the
couple were themselves gone, "we should have been as old as ever. Don't
let us tell anybody, this morning, that we're going. I couldn't bear it."

They had been obliged to take the secretary of the hotel into their
confidence, in the process of paying their bill. He put on his high hat
and came out to see them off. The portier was already there, standing at
the step of the lordly two-spanner which they had ordered for the long
drive to the station. The Swiss elevator-man came to the door to offer
them a fellow-republican's good wishes for their journey; Herr Pupp
himself appeared at the last moment to hope for their return another
summer. Mrs. March bent a last look of interest upon the proprietor as
their two-spanner whirled away.

"They say that he is going to be made a count."

"Well, I don't object," said March. "A man who can feed fourteen thousand
people, mostly Germans, in a day, ought to be made an archduke."

At the station something happened which touched them even more than these
last attentions of the hotel. They were in their compartment, and were in
the act of possessing themselves of the best places by putting their
bundles and bags on them, when they heard Mrs. March's name called.

They turned and saw Rose Adding at the door, his thin face flushed with
excitement and his eyes glowing. "I was afraid I shouldn't get here in
time," he panted, and he held up to her a huge bunch of flowers.

"Why Rose! From your mother?"

"From me," he said, timidly, and he was slipping out into the corridor,
when she caught him and his flowers to her in one embrace. "I want to
kiss you," she said; and presently, when he had waved his hand to them
from the platform outside, and the train had started, she fumbled for her
handkerchief. "I suppose you call it blubbering; but he is the sweetest
child!"

"He's about the only one of our Carlsbad compatriots that I'm sorry to
leave behind," March assented. "He's the only unmarried one that wasn't
in danger of turning up a lover on my hands; if there had been some
rather old girl, or some rather light matron in our acquaintance, I'm not
sure that I should have been safe even from Rose. Carlsbad has been an
interruption to our silver wedding journey, my dear; but I hope now th