Marguerite seemed suddenly troubled. “Why are you bitter even about trifles?” she queried. “Is that yet another departure from the old state of affairs?” “Perhaps,” he replied, in a tone that strove in vain to be light. “I must be unlearning fast the art of life as it should be lived. I suppose that with the years one passes from disenchantment to disenchantment. Isn’t that the rule of all down-slope walkers?” With a quick intake of breath Marguerite swung round toward him, and his heart contracted horribly as he saw that her eyes were wet. “There _is_ something amiss,” she whispered, bending ever so slightly forward, and stretching her little palms downward as if in swift renunciation of all that she had ever held. “There _is_ something. I knew it. I felt it.... Tell me, Basil ... tell me!” He had not bargained for this, and he was now dully doubting his own ears. Could this be Marguerite speaking? “Something amiss?” he repeated after her with would-be emphasis. “Oh, now look here, my dear child, be reasonable, please, and do cease to imagine that I am trying to conceal some catastrophe from you.” But Marguerite would no longer accept equivocation of any sort. “Reasonable?” she said, more calmly. “I am reasonable enough--at least for my age. And if you only reflect you will admit that I have some small reason to ask what I do--some infinitesimal right, _as a friend_, if you prefer it so.” “Oh yes--she too has rights!” flashed keenly through his mind. “And better ones than any other human being, if she but knew it.” “Certainly,” he said aloud, “you have all possible rights as my friend--as any of my friends have--to know what concerns me; but there is nothing--nothing worth telling, I assure you.” “Nothing?” she exclaimed. “When you are as dull as ditch-water--when you seem as blue as--” Her eyes went to the transparent vaulting scarcely veiling the sky, as if searching for a fitting comparison, and he grasped at his last chance of repairing his previous mistake. “I am blue, and a little sad; perhaps you are right.” He hesitated. “Just as any one else would be who contemplates a certain change in existing circumstances.” She was looking at him steadily, unswervingly, waitingly. “When I told you a little while ago that I didn’t know as yet exactly where I would spend the summer, I was speaking the truth. As a matter of fact, I do not know yet _exactly_ where, but it will be somewhere in Russia, probably at Tverna, and just ... on account of this indecision on my part I was afraid you’d laugh at me as you so often do!” “The Russian conception of what is laughable differs by the whole span of heaven from mine,” she said, with suspicious quietness. “The point of interest is, however, whether you are going there a-Maying in the mud, or ... whether ... well, whether you will be gone long.... I mean after the Maying and the summering are both done with.”