least feel it with him, so it came to the same thing. He used sometimes
to wonder what people would think they were--to fancy they were looked
askance at, as if it might be a suspected case of kidnapping. Morgan
wouldn't be taken for a young patrician with a preceptor--he wasn't smart
enough; though he might pass for his companion's sickly little brother.
Now and then he had a five-franc piece, and except once, when they bought
a couple of lovely neckties, one of which he made Pemberton accept, they
laid it out scientifically in old books. This was sure to be a great
day, always spent on the quays, in a rummage of the dusty boxes that
garnish the parapets. Such occasions helped them to live, for their
books ran low very soon after the beginning of their acquaintance.
Pemberton had a good many in England, but he was obliged to write to a
friend and ask him kindly to get some fellow to give him something for
them.

If they had to relinquish that summer the advantage of the bracing
climate the young man couldn't but suspect this failure of the cup when
at their very lips to have been the effect of a rude jostle of his own.
This had represented his first blow-out, as he called it, with his
patrons; his first successful attempt--though there was little other
success about it--to bring them to a consideration of his impossible
position. As the ostensible eve of a costly journey the moment had
struck him as favourable to an earnest protest, the presentation of an
ultimatum. Ridiculous as it sounded, he had never yet been able to
compass an uninterrupted private interview with the elder pair or with
either of them singly. They were always flanked by their elder children,
and poor Pemberton usually had his own little charge at his side. He was
conscious of its being a house in which the surface of one's delicacy got
rather smudged; nevertheless he had preserved the bloom of his scruple
against announcing to Mr. and Mrs. Moreen with publicity that he