other's presence? It does not matter. They were getting to know each
other, quite as much by what they did not say as by what they did say, by
the thousand little exchanges of feeling and sentiment which are
all-important, and never appear even in a stenographer's report of a
conversation. Only one thing is certain about it, that the girl could
recall every word that Mr. King said, even his accent and look, long
after he had forgotten even the theme of the talk. One thing, however,
he did carry away with him, which set him thinking. The girl had been
reading the "Life of Carlyle," and she took up the cudgels for the old
curmudgeon, as King called him, and declared that, when all was said,
Mrs. Carlyle was happier with him than she would have been with any other
man in England. "What woman of spirit wouldn't rather mate with an
eagle, and quarrel half the time, than with a humdrum barn-yard fowl?"
And Mr. Stanhope King, when he went away, reflected that he who had
fitted himself for the bar, and traveled extensively, and had a moderate
competence, hadn't settled down to any sort of career. He had always an
intention of doing something in a vague way; but now the thought that he
was idle made him for the first time decidedly uneasy, for he had an
indistinct notion that Irene couldn't approve of such a life.

This feeling haunted him as he was making a round of calls that day. He
did not return to lunch or dinner--if he had done so he would have found
that lunch was dinner and that dinner was supper--another vital
distinction between the hotel and the cottage. The rest of the party had
gone to the cliffs with the artist, the girls on a pretense of learning
to sketch from nature. Mr. King dined with his cousin.

"You are a bad boy, Stanhope," was the greeting of Mrs. Bartlett Glow,
"not to come to me. Why did you go to the hotel?"