I did not go till the following week, when I found that no one had
attempted to snap up the Conwell place. In fact, it rather snapped me
up, I secured it with so little trouble. I reported it so perfect that
all my wife's fears of a latent objection to it were roused again. But
when I said I thought we could relinquish it, her terrors subsided; and
I thought this the right moment to deliver a stroke that I had been
holding in reserve.

"You know," I began, "the Bentleys have their summer place there--the
old Bentley homestead. It's their ancestral town, you know."

"Bentleys? What Bentleys?" she demanded, opaquely.

"Why, those people we met on the _Corinthian_, summer before last--you
thought he was in love with the girl--"

A simultaneous photograph could alone reproduce Mrs. March's tumultuous
and various emotions as she seized the fact conveyed in my words. She
poured out a volume of mingled conjectures, assertions, suspicions,
conclusions, in which there was nothing final but the decision that we
must not dream of going there; that it would look like thrusting
ourselves in, and would be in the worst sort of taste; they would all
hate us, and we should feel that we were spies upon the young people;
for of course the Bentleys had got Glendenning there to marry him, and
in effect did not want any one to witness the disgraceful spectacle.

I said, "That may be the nefarious purpose of the young lady, but, as I
understood Glendenning, it is no part of her mother's design."

"What do you mean?"