ers again, a _bourgeois_
family of three generations, the old grandmother with a mushroom-hat
tied over her cap--soldiers and Fraeuleins _coketteering_. The air comes
to our faces, dry, warm, and elastic, yet freshened by the river, far
down in whose quiet heart all the lamps are burning again.

"Have you been here long?" says Mr. Musgrave, presently, in a formal
voice, from which I see that resentment is not yet absent.

"Yes," say I, having on the other hand fully recovered my good-humor, "a
good while--that is, not very long--three, four, three whole days."

"Do you call that a _good while_?"

"It seems more," reply I, looking frankly back at him in the lamplight,
and thinking that he cannot be much older than Algy, and that, in
consequence, it is rather a comfort not to be obliged to feel the
slightest respect for him.

"And how long have you been abroad altogether?"

We have reached the flower-lamps. We are standing by the bed in which
they are supposed to grow. There are half a dozen of them: a fuchsia, a
convolvulus, lilies.

"I do not think much of them," say I, disparagingly, kneeling down to
examine them. "What a villainous rose! It is like an _artichoke_!"

"I told you you would not like them," he says, not looking at the
flowers, but switching a little stick nonchalantly about; then, after a
moment: "How long did you say you had been abroad?"

"You asked me that before," reply I, sharply, rising from my knees, and
discovering that the evening grass has left a disfiguring green trace on
my smart _trousseau_ gown.

"Yes, and you did not give me any answer," he replies, with equal
sharpness.

"Because I cannot for the life of me recollect," reply I, looking up for
inspiration to the stars, which the great bright lamps make look small
and pale. "I must do a sum: what day of the month is this?--the 31st?
Oh, thanks, so it is; and we were married on the 20th. It is ten days,
then. Oh, it _must_ be more--it seems like ten _months_."

I am looking him full in the face as I say this, and I see a curious,
and to me _puzzling_, expression of inquiry and laughter in the shady
darkness of his eyes.

"Has the time seemed so long to you, then?"

"No," reply I, reddening with vexation at my own _betise_; "that
is--yes--because we have been to so many places, and seen so many
things--any one would understand _that_."

"And when do you go home?"

"In less than three weeks now," I reply, in an alert, or rat