The encounters always left the portier purple and perspiring, as any agitation must with a man so tight in his livery.

He bemoaned himself after one of them as the victim of an unhappy calling, in which he could take no exercise.

"It is a life of excitements, but not of movements," he explained to March; and when he learned where he was going, he regretted that he could not go to Carlsbad too.

"For sugar ?" he asked, as if there were overmuch of it in his own make.
March felt the tribute, but he had to say, "No; liver." "Ah!" said the portier, with the air of failing to get on common ground with him.
XXV.
The next morning was so fine that it would have been a fine morning in America.

Its beauty was scarcely sullied, even subjectively, by the telegram which the portier sent after the Marches from the hotel, saying that their missing trunk had not yet been found, and their spirits were as light as the gay little clouds which blew about in the sky, when their train drew out in the sunshine, brilliant on the charming landscape all the way to Carlsbad.