She saw them, and caught up the ticket, and read it, and flung it down
again. "Oh, I didn't think you would do it!" she burst out; and she
ran away to her room, where they could hear her sobbing, as they sat
haggardly facing each other.

"Well, that settles it," said Benton at last, with a hard gulp.

"Oh, I suppose so," his wife assented.

On his part, now, he had a genuine regret for her disappointment from
the sad safety of the trouble that would keep them at home; and on her
part she could be glad of it if any sort of comfort could come out of it
to him.

"Till she says go," he added, "we've got to stay."

"Oh yes," his wife responded. "The worst of it is, we can't even go back
to Tuskingum." He looked up suddenly at her, and she saw that he had not
thought of this. She made "Tchk!" in sheer amaze at him.

"We won't cross that river till we come to it," he said, sullenly, but
half-ashamed. The next morning the situation had not changed overnight,
as they somehow both crazily hoped it might, and at breakfast, which
they had at a table grown more remote from others with the thinning out
of the winter guests of the hotel, the father and mother sat down alone
in silence which was scarcely broken till Lottie and Boyne joined them.

"Where's Ellen?" the boy demanded.

"She's having her breakfast in her room," Mrs. Kenton answered.

"She says she don't want to eat anything," Lottie reported. "She made
the man take it away again."

The gloom deepened in the faces of the father and mother, but neither
spoke, and Boyne resumed the word again in a tone of philosophic
speculation. "I don't see how I'm going to get along, with those
European breakfasts. They say you can't get anything but cold meat or
eggs; and generally they don't expect to give you anything but bread and
butter with your coffee. I don't think that's the way to start the day,
do you, poppa?"

Kenton seemed not to have heard, for he went on silently eating, and the
mother, who had not been appealed to, merely looked distractedly across
the table at her children.

"Mr. Plumpton says he's coming down to see us off," said Lottie,
smoothing her napkin in her lap. "Do you know the time of day when the
boat sails, momma?"

"Yes," her brother broke in, "and if I had been momma I'd have boxed
your ears for the way you went on with him. You fairly teased him to
come. The way Lottie goes on with men is a shame, momma."

"What time does the boat sail, mo