I found myself prompt. “She’s _not_ too ill to travel: she only might have become so if she had stayed. This was just the moment to seize. The journey will dissipate the influence”--oh, I was grand!--“and carry it off.” “I see, I see”--Miles, for that matter, was grand too. He settled to his repast with the charming little “table manner” that, from the day of his arrival, had relieved me of all grossness of admonition. Whatever he had been driven from school for, it was not for ugly feeding. He was irreproachable, as always, today; but he was unmistakeably more conscious. He was discernibly trying to take for granted more things than he found, without assistance, quite easy; and he dropped into peaceful silence while he felt his situation. Our meal was of the briefest--mine a vain pretence, and I had the things immediately removed. While this was done Miles stood again with his hands in his little pockets and his back to me--stood and looked out of the wide window through which, that other day, I had seen what pulled me up. We continued silent while the maid was with us--as silent, it whimsically occurred to me, as some young couple who, on their wedding-journey, at the inn, feel shy in the presence of the waiter. He turned round only when the waiter had left us. “Well--so we’re alone!” XXIII “Oh, more or less.” I fancy my smile was pale. “Not absolutely. We shouldn’t like that!” I went on. “No--I suppose we shouldn’t. Of course we have the others.” “We have the others--we have indeed the others,” I concurred. “Yet even though we have them,” he returned, still with his hands in his pockets and planted there in front of me, “they don’t much count, do they?” I made the best of it, but I felt wan. “It depends on what you call ‘much’!”