Mrs. Shackleton looked surprised and not greatly elated. On their last trip to Europe, two years before, her husband had been so bored by the joys of foreign travel that she had made up her mind she would never ask him to go again. Now she said: “But you don’t want to go to Europe. You said last time you hated it.” “Did I? Yes, I guess I did. Well, I’m prepared to like it this time. We could take a spin over in the spring to London and Paris. We’d make quite a stay in Paris, and you women could buy clothes. You’d come, too, Pussy, wouldn’t you?” he said, turning to the girl. Her color rose now and her eyes sparkled. She had never been even to New York. “Wouldn’t I?” she said. “That _does_ make me smile.” “I thought so,” he answered good-humoredly--“and Maud, you’d like it, of course?” Maud did not like the thought of going at all. In this little party of four, two were moved in their actions by secret predilections of which the others were ignorant. Maud thought of leaving her love affair at the critical point it had reached, and, with anguish at her heart, looked heavily indifferent. “I don’t know,” she said, crumbling her bread, “I don’t think it’s such fun in Europe. You just travel round in little stuffy trains, and have to live in hotels without baths.” “Well, you and I, Pussy,” said Shackleton, “seem to be the only two who’ve got any enthusiasm. You’ll have to try and put some into Maud, and if the worst comes to the worst we can kidnap the old lady.” He was in an unusually good temper, and the dinner was animated and merry. Only Maud, after the European suggestion, grew more stolidly quiet than ever. But she cheered herself by the thought that the spring was six months off yet, and who could tell what might happen in six months? After dinner the ladies repaired to the music room, and Shackleton, following a custom of his, passed through one of the long windows into the garden, there to pace up and down while he smoked his cigar. The night was warm and odorous with the scent of hidden blossoms. Now and then his foot crunched the gravel of a path, as his walk took him back and forth over the long stretch of lawn broken by flower-beds and narrow walks. The great bulk of the house, its black mass illumined by congeries of lit windows, showed an inky, irregular outline against the star-strewn sky.