Rose was lying back on the pillows of a sofa, from which they would not let him get up. He was full of the trip to Holland, and had already pushed Kenby, as Kenby owned, beyond the bounds of his very general knowledge of the Dutch language, which Rose had plans for taking up after they were settled in Schevleningen. The boy scoffed at the notion that he was not perfectly well, and he wished to talk with March on the points where he had found Kenby wanting.
"Kenby is an encyclopaedia compared with me, Rose," the editor protested, and he amplified his ignorance for the boy's good to an extent which Rose saw was a joke. He left Holland to talk about other things which his mother thought quite as bad for him. He wished to know if March did not think that the statue of the bishop with the sparrow on its finger was a subject for a poem; and March said gayly that if Rose would write it he would print it in 'Every Other Week'.
The boy flushed with pleasure at his banter. "No, I couldn't do it.
But I wish Mr. Burnamy had seen it. He could. Will you tell him about it?" He wanted to know if March had heard from Burnamy lately, and in the midst of his vivid interest he gave a weary sigh.
His mother said that now he had talked enough, and bade him say good-by to the Marches, who were coming so soon to Holland, anyway. Mrs. March put her arms round him to kiss him, and when she let him sink back her eyes were dim.
"You see how frail he is?" said Mrs. Adding. "I shall not let him out of my sight, after this, till he's well again."
She had a kind of authority in sending Kenby away with them which was not lost upon the witnesses. He asked them to come into the reading-room a moment with him, and Mrs. March wondered if he were going to make some excuse to her for himself; but he said: "I don't know how we're to manage about the Triscoes. The general will have a room to himself, but if Mrs.
Adding takes Rose in with her, it leaves Miss Triscoe out, and there isn't a room to be had in this house for love or money. Do you think," he appealed directly to Mrs. March, "that it would do to offer her my room at the Swan?"
"Why, yes," she assented, with a reluctance rather for the complicity in which he had already involved her, and for which he was still unpunished, than for what he was now proposing. "Or she could come in with me, and Mr. March could take it."
"Whichever you think," said Kenby so submissively that she relented, to ask:
"And what will you do?"
He laughed. "Well, people have been known to sleep in a chair. I shall manage somehow."
"You might offer to go in with the general," March suggested, and the men apparently thought this was a joke. Mrs. March did not laugh in her feminine worry about ways and means.
"Where is Miss Triscoe?" she asked. "We haven't seen them."
"Didn't Mrs. Adding tell you? They went to supper at a restaurant; the general doesn't like the cooking here. They ought to have been back before this."
He looked up at the clock on the wall, and she said, "I suppose you would like us to wait."
"It would be very kind of you."
"Oh, it's quite essential," she returned with an airy freshness which Kenby did not seem to feel as painfully as he ought.
They all sat down, and the Triscoes came in after a few minutes, and a cloud on the general's face lifted at the proposition Kenby left Mrs.
March to make.
"I thought that child ought to be in his mother's charge," he said. With his own comfort provided for, he made no objections to Mrs. March's plan; and Agatha went to take leave of Rose and his mother. "By-the-way," the general turned to March, "I found Stoller at the restaurant where we supped. He offered me a place in his carriage for the manoeuvres. How are you going?"
"I think I shall go by train. I don't fancy the long drive."
"Well, I don't know that it's worse than the long walk after you leave the train," said the general from the offence which any difference of taste was apt to give him. "Are you going by train, too?" he asked Kenby with indifference.
"I'm not going at all," said Kenby. "I'm leaving Wurzburg in the morning."
"Oh, indeed," said the general.
Mrs. March could not make out whether he knew that Kenby was going with Rose and Mrs. Adding, but she felt that there must be a full and open recognition of the fact among them. "Yes," she said, "isn't it fortunate that Mr. Kenby should be going to Holland, too! I should have been so unhappy about them if Mrs. Adding had been obliged to make that long journey with poor little Rose alone."
"Yes, yes; very fortunate, certainly," said the general colorlessly.
Her husband gave her a glance of intelligent appreciation; but Kenby was too simply, too densely content with the situation to know the value of what she had done. She thought he must certainly explain, as he walked back with her to the Swan, whether he had misrepresented her to Mrs.
Adding, or Mrs. Adding had misunderstood him. Somewhere there had been an error, or a duplicity which it was now useless to punish; and Kenby was so apparently unconscious of it that she had not the heart to be cross with him. She heard Miss Triscoe behind her with March laughing in the gayety which the escape from her father seemed to inspire in her.
She was promising March to go with him in the morning to see the Emperor and Empress of Germany arrive at the station, and he was warning her that if she laughed there, like that, she would subject him to fine and imprisonment. She pretended that she would like to see him led off between two gendarmes, but consented to be a little careful when he asked her how she expected to get back to her hotel without him, if such a thing happened.
