A year after he had come to live with them Mr. and Mrs. Moreen suddenly gave up the villa¹ at Nice. Pemberton had got used to suddenness, having seen it practised on a considerable scale during two jerky little tours — one in Switzerland the first summer, and the other late in the winter, when they all ran down to Florence and then, at the end of ten days, liking² it much less than they had intended, straggled back in mysterious depression. They had returned to Nice “for ever,” as they said; but this didn’t prevent their squeezing, one rainy muggy³ May night, into a second-class railway-carriage — you could never tell by which class they would travel — where Pemberton helped them to stow away a wonderful collection of bundles and bags. The explanation of this manoeuvre⁴ was that they had determined⁵ to spend the summer “in some bracing⁶ place”; but in Paris they dropped into a small furnished apartment — a fourth floor in a third-rate avenue, where there was a smell on the staircase and the portier was hateful — and passed the next four months in blank indigence⁷.

The better part of this baffled sojourn⁸ was for the preceptor and his pupil, who, visiting the Invalides and Notre Dame⁹, the Conciergerie and all the museums, took a hundred remunerative¹⁰ rambles¹¹. They learned to know their Paris, which was useful, for they came back another year for a longer stay, the general character of which in Pemberton’s memory to-day mixes pitiably and confusedly with that of the first. He sees Morgan’s shabby knickerbockers — the

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