But in each of them there had grown up a secret unrest--it was, he knew, the hounds of habit whimpering from their kennels.

"No one was ever reformed," he had once confided to Frances, "by simply being turned out to grass!" So it was then that they had tried to drug their first rising doubts with the tumult of incessant travel and change.

His wife had lured him to secluded places, she had struggled to interest him in a language or two, she had planned quixotic courses of reading--as though a man such as he might be remolded by a few months of modern authors!--and carried him off to centres of gaiety--as though the beat of Hungarian bands and outlandish dances could drive that inmost fever out of his blood! He endured Aix-les-Bains and its rheumatics, with their bridge-whist and late dinners and incongruous dissipations, for a fortnight.

Then they fled to the huddled little hotels and _pensions_ of the narrow and dark wooded valley of Karlsbad, under skies which Frank declared to be bluer than the blue of forget-me-nots, where, amid Brahmins from India and royalty from Austria and audacious young duchesses from Paris and students from Petersburg and Berlin, and undecipherable strangers from all the remotest corners of the globe, it seemed to Durkin they were at last alone.

He confided this feeling to his wife, one tranquil morning after they had drunk their Sprudel from long-handled cups, at the spring where the comely, rubber-garmented native girls caught and doled out the biting hot spray of the geyser.