Page:The Author of Beltraffio, The Middle Years, Greville Fane, and Other Tales (London, Macmillan & Co., 1922).djvu/378

FORDHAM CASTLE "Yes—that's what I feel. I go," his neighbour had solemnly pursued, "about every two years."

With which she had looked away again, leaving him really not able to emulate her. "Well, I hadn't been before. You see it's a long way."

"Yes—that's the trying part. It makes you feel you'd have done better"

"To bring them right home and have it done over there?" he had asked as she let the sad subject go a little. He quite agreed. "Yes—that's what many do."

"But it gives of course a peculiar interest." So they had kept it up. "I mean in places that mightn't have so very much."

"Places like Rome and Constantinople?" he had rejoined while he noticed the cautious anxious sound of her "very." The tone was to come back to him, and it had already made him feel sorry for her, with its suggestion of her being at sea like himself. Unmistakably, poor lady, she too was trying to float—was striking out in timid convulsive movements. Well, he wouldn't make it difficult for her, and immediately, so as not to appear to cast any ridicule, he observed that, whenever great bereavements might have occurred, there was no place so remarkable as not to gain an association. Such memories made at the least another object for coming. It was after this recognition, on either side, that they adjourned to the garden—Taker having in his ears again the good lady's rather troubled or muddled echo: "Oh yes, when you come to all the objects—!" The grave of one's wife or one's daughter was an object quite as much as all those that one looked up in Baedeker—those of the family of the Castle of Chillon and the Dent du Midi, features of the view to be enjoyed from different parts of Madame Massin's premises. It was very soon, none the less, rather as if these latter 358