'Do,' I said, with polite enthusiasm. 'Do.' This was the backwash, I thought, of Dolly's German outbreak the other day, and Siegfried was going at last to be explained to me. 'Won't you sit down in this chair?' I said, pushing a comfortable one forward, and then sitting down myself on the edge of the sofa. 'Thank you. What I wish to say is--' She hesitated. I supposed her to be finding it difficult to proceed with Siegfried, and started off impulsively to her rescue. 'You know, I don't mind a bit about--' I began. 'What I wish to say is,' she went on again, before I had got out the fatal word, 'what I wish to point out to you--is that the weather has considerably cooled.' This was so remote from Siegfried that I looked at her a moment in silence. Then I guessed what was coming, and tried to put it off. 'Ah,' I said--for I dreaded, the grateful things she would be sure to say about having been here so long--'you do want a fire in the hall after all, then.' 'No, no. We are quite warm enough, I assure you. A fire would distress us. What I wish to say is--' Again she hesitated, then went on more firmly, 'Well, I wish to say that the weather having broken and the great heat having come to an end, the reasons which made you extend your kind, your delightful hospitality to us, have come to an end also. I need hardly tell you that we never, never shall be able to express to you--' 'Oh, but you're not going to give me notice?' I interrupted, trying to be sprightly and to clamber over her rock-like persistence in gratitude with the gaiety of a bright autumnal creeper. This was because I was nervous. I grow terribly sprightly when I am nervous. But indeed I shrink from Mrs. Barnes's gratitude. It abases me to the dust. It leaves me mourning in much the same way that Simon Lee's gratitude left Wordsworth mourning. I can't bear it. What a world it is, I want to cry out,--what a miserable, shameful, battering, crushing world, when so dreadfully little makes people so dreadfully glad! Then it suddenly struck me that the expression giving notice might not be taken by Mrs. Barnes, she being solemn, in the spirit in which it was offered by me, I being sprightly; and, desperately afraid of having possibly offended her, I seized on the first thing I could think of as most likely to soothe her, which was an extension, glowing and almost indefinite, of my invitation. 'Because, you know,' I said, swept along by this wish to prevent a wound, 'I won't accept the notice. I'm not going to let you go. That is, of course,' I added, 'if you and Dolly don't mind the quiet up here and the monotony. Won't you stay on here till I go away myself?'