you believe that could be, and I making the disturbance I did in
Paris?" he returned.

"Yes," I told him, "if you are trying to forget her."

"I should think it might look more as if I were trying to forget that I
wasn't good enough for her and that she knew it!"

He spoke in a voice which he would have made full of ease--"off-hand,"
as they say; but he failed to do so.

"That was the case?" I pressed him, you see, but smilingly.

"Looks a good deal like it," he replied, smoking much at once.

"So? But that is good for you, my friend!"

"Probably." He paused, smoking still more, and then said, "It's a
benefit I could get on just as well without."

"She is in North America?"

"No; over here."

"Ah! Then we will go where she is. That will be even better for you!
Where is she?"

"I don't know. She asked me not to follow her. Somebody else is doing
that."

The young man's voice was steady, and his face, as usual, showed
no emotion, but I should have been an Italian for nothing had I not
understood quickly. So I waited for a little while, then spoke of old
Pilatus out there in the sky, and we went to bed very late, for it was
out last night in Lucerne.

Two days later we roared our way out of the gloomy St. Gotthard and
wound down the pass, out into the sunshine of Italy, into that broad
plain of mulberries where the silkworms weave to enrich the proud
Milanese. Ah, those Milanese! They are like the people of Turin, and
look down upon us of Naples; they find us only amusing, because our
minds and movements are too quick for them to understand. I have
no respect for the Milanese, except for three things: they have a
cathedral, a picture, and a dead man.

We came to our hotel in the soft twilight, with the air so balmy one
wished to rise and float in it. This was the hour for the Cathedral;
therefore, leaving Leonardo and his fresco for the to-morrow, I
conducted my uncomplaining ward forth, and through that big arcade of
which the people are so proud, to the Duomo. Poor Jr. showed few signs
of life as we stood before that immenseness; he said patiently that it
resembled the postals, and followed me inside the portals with languor.

It was all grey hollowness in the vast place. The windows showed not
any colour nor light; the splendid pillars soared up into the air and
disappeared as if they mounted to heights of invisibility in the sky at
night. Very far away, at the other end of the church it seemed, one l