‘Ah, well! if she says she will go, she will go,’ said Marchmont; ‘and, as she says, the more perfect quiet I have, the sooner I am likely to get well. It is very provoking to be laid up in this way.’ Evidently his thoughts were entirely centred on himself and his sensations. Fulvia, not he, would decide upon where they were to go in order that he might have the ‘perfect quiet’ he spoke of. They sat with him for half an hour, and then Minna thought she must go. Fulvia said she would go downstairs with her, but promised Marchmont to return and read the newspapers to him. Minna unwillingly exerted herself to shake hands with him. He wished her good-bye with a restless, wandering glance which settled nowhere except on his wife. The two women parted. Fulvia came all the way downstairs with her guest, a proceeding which, Minna instinctively felt, was very unusual on her part. She supposed she might take it as a compliment, or even as a mark of affection. A meeting was arranged for a few days hence at the house of Minna’s friends, and Fulvia added: ‘He was quite right in saying that I said I should go with you to look at this house. Would you take me?’ ‘Wouldn’t I, my dear! I wish you would go there.’ Fulvia smiled. ‘I really am thinking about it. Though I haven’t seen it, it is the first thing I have heard of which has in the least attracted me. By the time I see you again I shall have made up my mind, and will let you know.’ ‘I think she will have made up her mind to come,’ said Minna to herself, as she went away. CHAPTER XVII. Minna had given Hans her address, and he one day called to see her. It was getting near the end of her stay in London. Her first reflection as he came into the room was perhaps slightly irrelevant. ‘How old is Hans now? Let me see: he must be twenty-eight at least. He might be anything, as far as looks go.’ He certainly might have been anything from twenty-eight to thirty-eight, because he was dark and grave, with a certain picturesqueness of figure and richness of colouring which made him look older than he really was. There was nothing left in him of that ingenuousness which she had known in him when he had been a youth. His movements had a certain slowness and deliberation which was neither languor nor effeminacy. His smile, very infrequent, was delightful when it came, and it came now as he drew near to his cousin Minna, took her hand, and bent his fine dark eyes upon her. ‘I have been remiss, Minna. I wanted to come before; but when one has been two whole years outside one’s own country, and returned to London, one is apt to find a good deal to do--to put it mildly.’ ‘I can well believe it, and feel the privilege of receiving any visit from you. To tell the truth, I thought you were booked to be abroad a good deal longer.’