act of turning his face to Paris. He wandered off to the pier in
company with happier tourists and, leaning on a rail, watched
enviously the preparation, the agitation of foreign travel. It was
for some minutes a foretaste of adventure; but, ah, when was he to
have the very draught? He turned away as he dropped this
interrogative sigh, and in doing so perceived that in another part of
the pier two ladies and a little boy were gathered with something of
the same wistfulness. The little boy indeed happened to look round
for a moment, upon which, with the keenness of the predatory age, he
recognised in our young man a source of pleasures from which he
lately had been weaned. He bounded forward with irrepressible cries
of "Geegee!" and Peter lifted him aloft for an embrace. On putting
him down the pilgrim from Jersey Villas stood confronted with a
sensibly severe Miss Teagle, who had followed her little charge.
"What's the matter with the old woman?" he asked himself as he
offered her a hand which she treated as the merest detail. Whatever
it was, it was (and very properly, on the part of a loyal suivante)
the same complaint as that of her employer, to whom, from a distance,
for Mrs. Ryves had not advanced an inch, he flourished his hat as she
stood looking at him with a face that he imagined rather white. Mrs.
Ryves's response to this salutation was to shift her position in such
a manner as to appear again absorbed in the Calais boat. Peter
Baron, however, kept hold of the child, whom Miss Teagle artfully
endeavoured to wrest from him--a policy in which he was aided by
Sidney's own rough but instinctive loyalty; and he was thankful for
the happy effect of being dragged by his jubilant friend in the very
direction in which he had tended for so many hours. Mrs. Ryves
turned once more as he came near, and then, from the sweet, strained
smile with which she asked him if he were on his way to France, he
saw that if she had been angry at his having followed her she had