“My dear, the world is surfeited with kind, good men. There are half a dozen of them at the other end of the piazza smoking; and there comes another to join them,” she added, as a large figure, semicircular in profile, advanced itself from a doorway toward a vacant chair among the smokers. “The very soul of kindness and goodness.” She beckoned toward her husband, who caught sight of her gesture. “Now I can tell you all his mental processes. First, surprise at seeing some one beckoning; then astonishment that it's I, though who else should beckon him?--then wonder what I can want; then conjecture that I may want him to come here; then pride in his conjecture; rebellion; compliance.” The ladies were in a scream of laughter as Mr. Brinkley lumbered heavily to their group. “What is it?” he asked. “Do you believe in broken engagements? Now quick--off-hand!” “Who's engaged?” “No matter.” “Well, you know Punch's advice to those about to marry?” “I know--chestnuts,” said his wife scornfully. They dismissed each other with tender bluntness, and he went in to get a match. “Ah, Mrs. Brinkley,” said one of the ladies, “it would be of no use for you to preach broken engagements to any one who saw you and Mr. Brinkley together.” They fell upon her, one after another, and mocked her with the difference between her doctrine and practice; and they were all the more against her because they had been perhaps a little put down by her whimsical sayings. “Yes,” she admitted. “But we've been thirty years coming to the understanding that you all admire so much; and do you think it was worth the time?” XXI. Mavering kept up until he took leave of the party of young people who had come over on the ferry-boat to Eastport for the frolic of seeing him off. It was a tremendous tour de force to accept their company as if he were glad of it, and to respond to all their gay nothings gaily; to maintain a sunny surface on his turbid misery. They had tried to make Alice come with them, but her mother pleaded a bad headache for her; and he had to parry a hundred sallies about her, and from his sick heart humour the popular insinuation that there was an understanding between them, and that they had agreed together she should not come. He had to stand about on the steamboat wharf and listen to amiable innuendoes for nearly an hour before the steamer came in from St. John. The fond adieux of his friends, their offers to take any message back, lasted during the interminable fifteen minutes that she lay at her moorings, and then he showed himself at the stern of the boat, and waved his handkerchief in acknowledgment of the last parting salutations on shore.