At the station something happened which touched them even more than these last attentions of the hotel. They were in their compartment, and were in the act of possessing themselves of the best places by putting their bundles and bags on them, when they heard Mrs. March's name called.
They turned and saw Rose Adding at the door, his thin face flushed with excitement and his eyes glowing. “I was afraid I shouldn't get here in time,” he panted, and he held up to her a huge bunch of flowers.
“Why Rose! From your mother?”
“From me,” he said, timidly, and he was slipping out into the corridor, when she caught him and his flowers to her in one embrace. “I want to kiss you,” she said; and presently, when he had waved his hand to them from the platform outside, and the train had started, she fumbled for her handkerchief. “I suppose you call it blubbering; but he is the sweetest child!”
“He's about the only one of our Carlsbad compatriots that I'm sorry to leave behind,” March assented. “He's the only unmarried one that wasn't in danger of turning up a lover on my hands; if there had been some rather old girl, or some rather light matron in our acquaintance, I'm not sure that I should have been safe even from Rose. Carlsbad has been an interruption to our silver wedding journey, my dear; but I hope now that it will begin again.”
“Yes,” said his wife, “now we can have each other all to ourselves.”
“Yes. It's been very different from our first wedding journey in that. It isn't that we're not so young now as we were, but that we don't seem so much our own property. We used to be the sole proprietors, and now we seem to be mere tenants at will, and any interloping lover may come in and set our dearest interests on the sidewalk. The disadvantage of living along is that we get too much into the hands of other people.”
“Yes, it is. I shall be glad to be rid of them all, too.”
“I don't know that the drawback is serious enough to make us wish we had died young—or younger,” he suggested.
“No, I don't know that it is,” she assented. She added, from an absence where he was sufficiently able to locate her meaning, “I hope she'll write and tell me what her father says and does when she tells him that he was there.”