“The doctors want my husband to feel that he is in his own home; otherwise he would be so wretched that the climate would not do him any good,” she explained, winter after winter, to the sympathising Philadelphians and Baltimoreans; and Mr. Welland, beaming across a breakfast table miraculously supplied with the most varied delicacies, was presently saying to Archer: “You see, my dear fellow, we camp—we literally camp. I tell my wife and May that I want to teach them how to rough it.”

Mr. and Mrs. Welland had been as much surprised as their daughter by the young man’s sudden arrival; but it had occurred to him to explain that he had felt himself on the verge of a nasty cold, and this seemed to Mr. Welland an all-sufficient reason for abandoning any duty.

“You can’t be too careful, especially toward spring,” he said, heaping his plate with straw-coloured griddle- cakes and drowning them in golden syrup. “If I’d only been as prudent at your age May would have been dancing at the Assemblies now, instead of spending her winters in a wilderness with an old invalid.”

“Oh, but I love it here, Papa; you know I do. If only Newland could stay I should like it a thousand times better than New York.”

“Newland must stay till he has quite thrown off his cold,” said Mrs. Welland indulgently; and the young man laughed, and said he supposed there was such a thing as one’s profession.

He managed, however, after an exchange of telegrams with the firm, to make his cold last a week; and it shed an ironic light on the situation to know that Mr. Letterblair’s indulgence was partly due to the satisfactory way in which his brilliant young junior partner had settled the troublesome matter of the Olenski divorce. Mr. Letterblair had let Mrs. Welland know that Mr. Archer had “rendered an invaluable service” to the whole family, and that old Mrs. Manson Mingott had been particularly pleased; and one day when May had gone for a drive with her father in the only vehicle the place produced Mrs. Welland took occasion to touch on a topic which she always avoided in her daughter’s presence.

“I’m afraid Ellen’s ideas are not at all like ours. She was barely eighteen when Medora Manson took her back to Europe—you remember the excitement when she appeared in black at her coming-out ball? Another of Medora’s fads—really this time it was almost prophetic! That must have been at least twelve years ago; and since then Ellen has never been to America. No wonder she is completely Europeanised.”

“But European society is not given to divorce: Countess Olenska thought she would be conforming to American ideas in asking for her freedom.” It was the first time that the young man had pronounced her name since he had left Skuytercliff, and he felt the colour rise to his cheek.

Mrs. Welland smiled compassionately. “That is just like the extraordinary things that foreigners invent about us. They think we dine at two o’clock and countenance divorce! That is why it seems to me so foolish to entertain them when they come to New York. They accept our hospitality, and then they go home and repeat the same stupid stories.”

Archer made no comment on this, and Mrs. Welland continued: “But we do most thoroughly appreciate your persuading Ellen to give up the idea. Her grandmother and her uncle Lovell could do nothing with her; both of them have written that her changing her mind was entirely due to your influence—in fact she said so to her grandmother. She has an unbounded admiration for you. Poor Ellen—she was always a wayward child. I wonder what her fate will be?”

“What we’ve all contrived to make it,” he felt like answering. “if you’d all of you rather she should be Beaufort’s mistress than some decent fellow’s wife you’ve certainly gone the right way about it.”

He wondered what Mrs. Welland would have said if he had uttered the words instead of merely thinking them. He could picture the sudden decomposure of her firm placid features, to which a lifelong mastery over trifles had given an air of factitious authority. Traces still lingered on them of a fresh beauty like her