t anyhow he isn't the kind who pumps naughty little girls
about their grown-up relations' affairs.

"I am only concerned with yours and Miss Destrey's present," he said
after a minute.

"But the present so soon becomes the past, doesn't it? There's never
more than just a minute of the present, really, if you come to look at
it in that way, all the rest is past and future."

"Never mind," said Mr. Barrymore. "You've got more future than any of
the party."

"And poor Maida has less."

He forgot about his old steering-wheel for part of a second, and gave me
such a glance that I knew I had him on my hook this time.

"Why do you say that?" he asked, quite sharply.

"Oh, you _are_ interested in somebody's future beside your own then?"

"Who could help being--in hers?"

"You look as if you thought I meant she was dying of a decline," said I.
"It isn't quite as bad as that, but--well, beautiful as Maida is I
wouldn't change places with her, unless I could change souls as well. It
would be a good deal better for Maida in _this_ world if she could have
mine, though just the opposite in the next."

"Such talk clouds the sunshine," said Mr. Barrymore, "even for a
stranger like me, when you prophesy gloomy mysteries for one who
deserves only happiness. You said something of the sort to Moray
yesterday. He told me, but I was in hope that you had been joking."

"No," said I. "But I suppose Maida doesn't think the mysteries gloomy,
or she wouldn't 'embrace' them--if that's the right word for it. Mamma
and I imagined that coming to Europe would make her see differently
perhaps, but it hadn't the last time I asked her. She thought Paris lots
of fun, but all the same she was homesick for the stupid old convent
where she was brought up, and which she is going to let _swallow_ her up
in a year."

"Good Heavens, how terrible!" exclaimed our chauffeur, looking
tragically handsome. "Can nothing be done to save her? Couldn't you and
your mother induce her to change her mind?"

"We've tried," said I. "She saw a lot of society in Paris and when we
were at Cap Martin, but it gave her the sensation of having made a whole
meal on candy. Mamma has the idea of being presented to your Queen
Alexandra next spring, if she can manage it, and she told Maida that, if
she'd tack on a little piece to her year of travel, _she_ might be done
too, at the same time. But Maida didn't seem to care particularly about
it; and the society novels that M