"To England, yes." He smiled half sorrowfully, half bitterly. He was thinking how easy it might be for Rosamund to give up her old home and her old friends altogether; and he was asking himself, too, if he had really toiled through these many years only to have the results squandered at last by a stranger in a strange land. "To England, yes," he repeated. "Arthur has postponed his vacation until late in the fall, and he hopes to be able to spend as much as two or three weeks at home. At home; he is a British subject, you know--he has never been naturalized." The air quivered with the quick pulsations of the locomotive of a passing suburban train. As it moved away Brower heard again the voice of Bingham slow, grave, earnest--a voice of warning and alarm, one might have thought. "Some of them are here for years before they take out their papers," rejoined Brower. "And lots of them never take them out at all." "I don't know what's to be done," said Marshall, with a fretful anxiety. "I've given up coffee; some tell me that I ought to give up smoking, too, but others say it really doesn't make any difference. But I must do something; I must have better rest. "I can't work without my sleep, and I--I can't let myself fail--now." Jane was speaking once again--more steadily, more coolly, more composedly, it seemed. "Poor pa;--it can't be so serious as that," the listener thought he understood her to say. "I've heard of bromine," said Brower. "That's simpler, isn't it--and safer?" Jane's voice had ceased, and silence maintained its sway within. "She will meet all his family," the old gentleman went on. "She seems to expect to find them very fine people--finer than any we have here. And she will see the place where they live--a very much handsomer place, I make out, than any in this part of the world." A drawn and weary smile passed lightly over his face. There was a movement in the bay-window, and presently a solid footstep in the hall. "There's nothing like finding things out for yourself," said Brower, colorlessly. Bingham appeared on the door-step, just as the tail of locomotive smoke swept over the front yard. "Will you smoke with us?" asked Marshall. Brower smiled, though neither of the others seemed conscious of any secondary meaning in this simple question. "Thank you, no," replied Bingham. "I am moving on to an appointment, and am a little late as it is." He looked down on Marshall with an expression of friendly solicitude, and shook hands with him in a long, slow clasp. "Good-night; you are entitled to better care than you are giving yourself." And he moved down the footpath towards the front gate. Marshall looked after him wistfully. "If I were only in that man's shoes! If I but had half his health and strength!" Brower heard nothing of this; he was straining his ears for a further sound from within.