Stainton returned to Paris at the end of eight days in far better spirits than he had been in when he left. He had sold the mine at nearly his own figure, and he had what he considered reasons for believing that Dr. Boussingault had exaggerated his condition. Muriel's letters had, to be sure, been unsatisfactory; they had been brief and hurried; far from congratulating him on the success of his business affairs when he announced it, they made no mention of it; but then, he had never before received any letters from Muriel, and doubtless these represented her normal method of correspondence. He concluded that if they were below the normal, that was due to the cares of her condition.

Their sitting-room at the Chatham was dim when he entered it, for the day was dull, and Muriel had several of the curtains drawn. She rose to meet him, and he embraced her warmly.

"Hello," he said. "You understood my wire, didn't you? I didn't want to have to say 'howdy' to my sweetheart at the Boussingaults'. Oh, but it's good to be with you again!"

"What wire?" asked Muriel.

"Why, didn't you get it?" said Stainton. "The wire telling you to come here."

"Oh," said Muriel, "that one? Yes."

"You see," explained Jim as he kissed her again and again, "I wanted to have you right away all to myself; that's why I asked you to come back here."

"Yes," said Muriel, "that was better. I didn't want to have you meet me before those strangers."

"Not exactly strangers, dear; but it's better to be together, just our two selves—just our one self, isn't it? And we'll be that always now," he continued joyously as he sat down in an arm-chair and drew her to his knee. "Just we two. No more business. Never again. I have earned my reward and got it. The blessed mine has served its turn and is gone—going, going, gone—and at a splendid figure. Sold to M. Henri DuperrÉ Boussingault et Cie., for——I told you the figure, didn't I—our figure? Isn't it splendid?"

"I am glad," said Muriel.

"You don't really object?" he asked.

"Why should I? Of course I am glad."

"But don't you remember? Once you said that you didn't want me to sell it."

"Did I? Oh, yes; I do remember—but you showed me how foolish that was."

He laughed happily.

"I am a great converter," he said. "If you could only have heard me converting those Frenchmen to my belief in the mine, Muriel—and mostly through interpreters, too; for only two of them spoke any English, and you know what my French is. But I wrote you all that."

"Yes," replied Muriel, "you wrote me all that."

"I can't say so much for your letters," Jim went on. "They were a little brief, dearie: brief and rather vague. Did you miss me?"

"Yes, Jim."

"Did you? Maybe I didn't miss you! Oh, how I wanted to be with you. On Wednesday, while they were thinking it over for the hundredth time and there was nothing for me to do but knock about Lyons, I nearly jumped on a train to come all the way here to see you. How would you have liked that?"

"I should——" She stopped and put her head on his shoulder.

"Poor dear," he said; "poor lonely girly! You did miss me, then? Were the Boussingaults kind? Of course they were; but how were they kind? Tell me all about your visit there. I was glad to get every line you wrote me; I kissed your signature every night and each morning; but you didn't tell me much news, dearest. Tell me now about your visit to the Boussingaults."

Muriel sat upon his knee.

"I didn't go to the Boussingaults," she said.

"What?" Stainton started so that he almost unseated her.

"I didn't go to the Boussingaults," she repeated.

"But, dearest, how—What?—Where were you? You mean to say that you stayed here, alone, in this hotel?"

She nodded.

Stainton was amazed; he was shocked that she could have deceived him and sorely troubled at the effect of this on the Boussingaults.

"You never told me," he said. "You might have told me, Muriel. Why did you do such a foolish thing? Why did you do it?"

Muriel stood up. She turned her back toward him.

"I don't know," she said. "I—Oh, you know I couldn't bear that man!"

"But you might have told me, dear. Why, all my letters went there! Then you never got my letters?"

She shook her head.

"Muriel! And you pretended—Didn't Madame Boussingault call for you? She said she would call the afternoon that I left."

"I suppose she did."

"Suppose! Don't you know?" Jim also was on his feet. "Didn't you see her? You don't mean to say that you didn't see her?"

"I didn't see her. I left word at the bureau that I was out. I left word that I had gone to Lyons with you."

"Good heavens, Muriel! What will they think? What must they be thinking right now? My letters to you went there. I wrote every day. They would know from the arrival of those letters addressed to you from Lyons that you weren't with me."

She sank on a chair and began feebly to cry.

Jim knelt by her, his annoyance remaining, but his heart touched.

"There, there!" he said. "I understand. You wanted to go with me and were afraid to say so. I wish now that you had gone. That doctor is a fool. He must be a fool. And he isn't a pleasant man. I understand, dearie. Don't say any more. I was cruel——"

"No, no!" sobbed Muriel.

"I was. Yes, I was."

"You are the best man in the world, only—only——"

"I was the worst, the very worst. If you only had told me how you felt, dearest. If you only hadn't deceived me!"

"I had to."

"Out of consideration for me."

"No."

"It was. I understand. You thought the trip alone would do me good, and so you wouldn't say a word to change my plans." He had no thought for anything but contrition now. "And you stuck it out. My poor, brave, lonely darling! To think of me being so callous! How could I? And you in your condition!"

She drew from him.

"Jim——" she said.

"I won't hear you accuse yourself," he protested.

"But, Jim——"

"Not now. Not ever. Not another word. Never mind the Boussingaults. Boussingault is a physician, after all, and will understand when I tell him."

"Don't tell him, Jim."

"We'll see; we'll see."

"Please don't. I hate him so, I never want to have to think of him again."

"Don't you bother, dearie. You are the finest woman that ever lived."

"But, Jim, I'm not." She kept her head averted. "I am—I dare say I am as bad——"

"Stop," he commanded. "I won't hear it. Not even from you. I will not. Think, dearest: we are foolish to be unhappy. We have every reason in the world to be happy. We are rich. We have no business to bother or interfere with whatever we may want to do. We love each other and soon"—he broke the tacit treaty of silence concerning their child—"in a few months we are to have a little baby to complete everything."

"Don't!" said Muriel.

But Stainton took her by both hands and raised her and kissed her.

"Not this time," he said. "This once I am going to have my way. I am going to make you happy in spite of yourself. We shall never see or hear of Boussingault again if you are only as obedient as you are nearly always. It is still early afternoon. We are going out together and make a tour of the shops."

She lifted her face with a troubled smile.

"I have everything I want," she said.

"Poor dear," said Stainton, "you're pale. I suppose you scarcely dared to go out of doors while I was away. No, come on: we shall go now."

"Please," said Muriel; "I have all I want."

"All?" smiled her husband.

"Of course I have. You've got me such loads of lovely things already that I don't know what I am to do with them all and where to pack them. You know you have got me ever so much, Jim."

"For yourself, perhaps I have got you a few things, dearie; and I'm glad you like them. But I have always heard that Paris was the place to get some other sort of things. Aren't there some of those—some little things—some little lace things that we ought to get against the arrival of the newcomer? I am so proud, Muriel, and I want the newcomer to know I am."

Muriel's voice faltered.

"So soon——" she said.

"We might as well make what preparations we can while we are in the city where the best preparations can be made. No, no. You must come. Come along."

She went with him, pale and silent, and Jim led her through shop after shop and forced her, by good-natured insistence, to buy baby clothes. She protested at the start; she tried to cut the expedition in half; she endeavoured to postpone this purchase or that; but he would not heed her. He urged her to suggest articles of the infantile toilette of which he was totally ignorant; when she declared that she knew as little as he, he made her translate his questions to the frankly delighted shop clerks. He had been inspired with the idea that, by such a process as this, he could bring her to a proper point of view in regard to the approaching event, and he did not concede failure until Muriel at last broke down and fainted in their taxi-mÈtre.

The next morning she told Jim that she wanted to go away.

"All right," said Stainton: after his journey from Lyons he had slept long and heavily and was still very tired. "Where'd you like to go?"

"I don't know. Anywhere. I'm not particular."

"Well, we'll think it over to-day and look up the time-tables."

They were in their sitting-room at the hotel. Muriel parted the curtains and stood looking out upon a grey day.

"I don't want to think it over," she said.

"But we've got to know where we're going before we start."

"I don't see why. Besides, I said I wasn't particular where we went. I want to go to-day."

"To-day?" Jim did not like to rush about so madly, and his voice showed it.

"Why not? Look at the weather. Half the time we've been here it's been like this. I don't think Paris agrees with me."

He softened.

"Aren't you well?"

"No."

"What is it? My dear child!" He came toward her.

"Don't call me that," she said.

"Why not, Muriel?"

"It sounds as if you were so much older than I am. Jim——" She put her hand in his—"I'm horrid, I know——"

"You're never that!"

"Yes I am. I'm horrid now. You don't know. I'm not ill, but I'm so tired of Paris. It grates on my nerves. Let's go away now. The servants can pack, and we can be somewhere else by evening."

Again Muriel took refuge at the window.

"There's Switzerland," she said. "I should like to see the Alps."

"Isn't it rather early in the year for them?"

"I don't think so."

"It'll be cold, dear."

"Well, we can stand a little cold, Jim. If we wait till the warm weather, we shall run into all the summer tourists."

She had her way. The servants packed, and Jim went out to make arrangements. In an hour he was back.

"All right," he triumphantly announced. "I've ordered our next batch of mail sent on as far as NeuchÂtel. We can get a train in forty-five minutes to Dijon, where we might as well stop over night. I found a ticket-seller that spoke some sort of English—and here are the tickets. Can you be ready?"

She was ready. They started at once upon a feverish and constantly distracting journey.

The night was passed at Dijon. In the early morning they boarded their train for Switzerland, went through the flat country east of Mouchard, then swept into the Juras, climbing high in air and looking over fruitful plains that stretched to the horizon and were cut by white strips of road which seemed to run for lengths of ten miles without deviation from their tangent. The train would plunge into a black tunnel and emerge to look down at a little valley among vineyards with old red-tiled cottages clustered around a high-spired church. Another tunnel would succeed, and another red-tiled village and high-spired church would follow. Mile upon mile of pine-forest spread itself along the tracks, and then, at last, toward late afternoon, far beyond Pontarlier and the fortressed pass to the east of it, there was revealed, forward and to the right, what Muriel mistook for jagged, needle-like clouds about a strip of the sky: the lake of NeuchÂtel with the white Sentis to the Mont Blanc Alpine range, the Jungfrau towering in its midst.

But a day at NeuchÂtel sufficed Muriel; on the next morning she wanted to move on. She made enquiries.

"We might motor to Soleure," she said to Stainton, and when the motor was finally chosen, she decided for the train and Zurich.

"Why, they say there is nothing much to see in Zurich," Jim faintly protested.

"Let's find out for ourselves," said Muriel. "Besides, we have done almost no travelling, and that's what we came for, and now you've no business and nothing else to do."

So they were en route again on the day following, by way of Berne, through the wooded mountains, past the loftily placed castle of Aarburg, past picturesque Olten and Brugg with its ancient abbey of KÖnigsfelden, where the Empress Elizabeth and Queen Agnes of Hungary had sought to commemorate the murder of the Emperor Albert of Austria by John of Swabia, five hundred years before. They saw the hotels of Baden and the Cistercian abbey of Wettingen, and they came, by noon, to Zurich.

They lunched and took a motor drive about the city. In the midst of their tour, just as they were speeding through the Stadthaus-Platz on their way to the Gross-MÜnster, Muriel said:

"I believe you were right, after all, Jim. There isn't much to see here. Let's go on to-morrow."

It was a tribute to his powers of prediction.

"Very well," he answered. "As a matter of fact, I should like to go back to the hotel this minute and lie down."

She would not hear of that.

"Oh, no!" she protested. "There is the Zwingli Museum, the Hohe Promenade, and the National Museum to see. We mustn't miss them, you know. What would Aunt Ethel say?"

Nor could she permit him to miss them. She seemed to thrive as much upon the labour as if she had been shopping as she used to shop in her unmarried days, and she dragged him after her, a husband more weary than he had often been in his pilgrimages through the Great Desert.

"To-morrow," he yawned, as he flung himself down to sleep, eight hours later, "we shall start for some place where we can rest and see a few real Alps. We'll go to the Engadine."

Muriel was seated at some distance from the bed. She was stooping to loosen her boots, and her hair fell over her face and hid it.

"Don't let's go there," she said. "Let's go to Innsbruck."

"Innsbruck? That's in Austria, isn't it?"

"Is it? Well, what if it is, Jim?"

"I thought you wanted to see Switzerland."

"We've seen it, haven't we?"

"Only a slice of it; and it must be a long and tiresome ride to Innsbruck."

Muriel dropped one boot and then the other and carried them outside the door.

"Anyhow," she said, returning, "we have seen enough of Switzerland to know what it's like, Jim. I'm awfully tired of it." She came to the bed and kissed him lightly on the cheek. "Do you mind, dear?" she added.

"Oh, no," he sighed. "I suppose not. Only let's go to sleep now: I am about done up."

Muriel said nothing to that, but the next morning she assumed the plan to be adopted, and they went to Innsbruck. They went by the way that Franz von Klausen had described to her: by the narrow, mountain-guarded Waldersee, the Castle Lichtenstein, the ruins of GrÄphang and, on the great rock that rises over Berschia, the pilgrim-church of St. Georgen.

Jim had tipped the guard to secure, at least for a time, the privacy of their compartment, and the guard, a little fellow with flaring moustaches and a uniform that was almost the uniform of an officer, saluted gravely and promised seclusion. Thus, for some hours, they had the place to themselves, but the train gradually filled, and at last there entered a young Austrian merchant, who insisted upon giving them a sense of his knowledge of English and American literature.

"All Austrians of culture read your Irving," he said; "also your Harte and Twain and Do-nelli."

"Our what?" asked Jim.

"Please?"

"I didn't catch that last name."

"Donelli—Ignatius Donelli."

"Oh! Ignatius Donnelly—yes."

"Indeed, yes, sir; and you will find few that do not by the heart know of Shakespeare: 'Friends, Romans, Countrymen, come listen to me!'"

The Austrian left the train just before they reached the six-and-a-half-mile Arlberg Tunnel and, when they returned to daylight after twenty minutes, Stainton asked his wife:

"Didn't that fellow remind you of von Klausen?"

Muriel moved uneasily. Von Klausen's name had not been mentioned more than twice between them since they had left the Friedrich Barbarossa.

"Why, no," she answered.

"I thought they spoke alike, Muriel."

"Did you? As I remember the Captain, his English was better."

Stainton reflected.

"Perhaps it was," he admitted. "But, by the way, your Austrian seemed rather to neglect us in Paris."

"My Austrian? Why mine?"

"By right of discovery. You discovered him, didn't you?"

"You mean that he discovered me. I don't like Captain von Klausen."

He attempted to argue against her prejudice, and they came near to quarrelling. In the end, Muriel protested with tears that she hated all Austrians and all Austria, and that they must move on to Italy at once.

Stainton obtained only a day's respite in Innsbruck. They drove to the Triumphal Gate at the extremity of the Maria-Theresien-Strasse and then across to the scene of the Tyrolese battles at Berg Isel, returning by way of the Stadthaus Platz, where the band was playing in the pale spring sunshine and where, in rÔles of gallants to the fashionable ladies of the city, strolled, in uniforms of grey, of green, and of light blue, scores of dapper, slim-waisted Austrian officers. But Muriel said that the women were dowdy and their escorts effeminate; she scorned the "Golden Roof" because the gilt was disappearing and the copper showing through; she pronounced the Old Town, with its mediÆval roofed-streets, unwholesome; she would not stop for beer at the Goldene Adler, where Hofer drank. That worn and tarnished Hofkirche, "the Westminster of the Tyrol," with its grotesque statues and its empty tomb of Maximilian, she dismissed as "a dirty barn."

Muriel was cold; she said that she wanted to find warm weather. Stainton was tired; he said that he wanted to find a place where they could loaf. So they left for Verona, feeling certain that they would there secure these things—and "sunny Italy" welcomed them with a snowstorm.

Muriel was again in tears.

"It's no use," she sobbed; "we can't get what we want anywhere."

"Of course we can," sighed Stainton, "and the snowstorm will clear. Cheer up, dear; we've only to look hard enough or wait a bit."

"But I'm tired of looking and waiting—we've been doing that ever since we went away. Let's go back to Paris."

Back to Paris! She had taken him on this nerve-destroying journey; she had headed for this place and swerved to that; she had exhausted them both by her unaccountable whims and her switching resolutions—and now she wanted to go back to Paris!

"You said that Paris didn't agree with you, dear," pleaded Stainton.

"I know; but now it will be spring there—real spring—and everyone says that is the most beautiful time of the year in Paris."

"Yet the climate——"

"It will suit me in the spring; I know it will."

"Do you think"—Stainton put his hand upon hers—"do you think that you can rest there: really rest?"

"I know I can. O, Jim, I try to like it here, but I can't speak a word of Italian, and the French of these people is simply awful. I did my best to be good in Innsbruck, but I don't know any German, either, and so I hated that. Do you realise that we've been hurrying—hurrying—hurrying, so that we are really worn to shreds?"

"I know it," said Stainton. He was so travel-wearied that he looked sixty years old.

"I dare say that is what has made me so horrid," said Muriel: "that pull, pull, pull at my nerves. I don't know what's the matter with me; but I'm quite sure that getting back to Paris will be like getting back home."

This is how it came about that, two days later, they were once more quartered at the Chatham.