I sit down as far from the window as the dimensions of the room will allow, call Vick, who comes at first sneakingly and doubtful of her reception, up on my lap, and take a book. It is the one nearest to my hand, and I plunge into it haphazard in the middle.

This is the sentence that first greets me: "Her whole heart was in her boy. She often feared that she loved him too much—more than God himself—yet she could not bear to pray to have her love for her child lessened."

Not a very difficult one to construe, is it? and yet, having come to the end, and found that it conveyed no glimmering of an idea to my mind, I begin it over again.

"Her whole heart was in her boy. She often feared that she loved him too much—more than God himself—yet she could not bear to pray to have her love for her child lessened."

Still no better! What is it all about?

I begin over again.

"Her whole heart was in her boy," etc. I go through this process ten times. I should go through it twenty, or even thirty, for I am resolved to go on reading, but at the end of the tenth, my ear—unconsciously strained—catches the sound of a step at the stair-foot. It is not the footman's. It is firmer, heavier, and yet quicker.

Eight weary months is it since I last heard that footfall. My heart pulses with mad haste, my cheeks throb, but I sit still, and hold the book before my eyes. I will not go to meet him. I will be as indifferent as he! When he opens the door, I will not even look round, I will be too much immersed in the page before me.

"Her whole heart was in her boy. She often feared that—"

The door-handle is turning. I cannot help it! Against my will, my head turns too. With no volition of my own—against my firmest intention—my feet carry me hastily toward him. My arms stretch themselves out. Thank God! thank God! whatever happens afterward, I shall still thank God, and call him good for allowing it. I am in Roger's embrace. No more mistakes! no more delays! he is here, and I am kissing him as I never kissed any one—as I certainly never kissed him in my life before.

Well, I suppose that in every life there are some moments that are absolutely good—that one could not mend even if one were given the power to try! I suppose that even those who, looking back over their history, say, most distinctly and certainly, "It was a failure," can yet lay the finger of memory on some such gold minutes—it may be only half a dozen, only four, only two—but still on some.

This is one of my gold moments, one of those misplaced ones that have strayed out of heaven, where, perhaps, they are all such—perhaps—one can't be sure, for what human imagination can grasp the idea of even a day, wholly made of such minutes?

I have forgotten Mrs. Huntley—Mr. Musgrave. Every ill suspicion, every stinging remembrance, is dead or fallen into a trance. All bad thoughts have melted away from the earth. Only joyful love and absolute faith remain, only the knowledge that Roger is mine, and I am his, and that we are in each other's arms. I do not know how long we remain without speaking. I do not imagine that souls in bliss ever think of looking at the clock. He is the first to break silence. For the first time for eight months I hear his voice again—the voice that for so many weeks seemed to me no better than any other voice—whose tones I now feel I could pick out from those of any other living thing, did all creation shout together.

"Let me look at my wife!" he says, taking my countenance in his tender hands, as if it were made of old china, and would break if he let it fall. "I feel as if I had never had a wife before, as if it were quite a new plaything."

I make no verbal answer. I am staring up with all my eyes into his face, thinking, with a sort of wonder, how much goodlier, younger, statelier it is than it has appeared to me in any of those dream-pictures, which yet mostly flatter.

"My wife! my wife!" he says, speaking the words most softly, as if they greatly pleased him, and replacing with carefullest fingers a stray and arrant lock that has wandered from its fellows into my left eye. "What has come to you? Had I forgotten what you were like? How pretty you are! How well you look!"

"Do I?" say I, with a pleasant simper; then, with a sudden and overwhelming recollection of the bilious gingery frock, and the tousled hair, "No, nonsense!" I say, uneasily, "impossible! You are laughing at me! Ah!"—(with a sigh of irrepressible regret and back-handed pride)—"you should have seen me half an hour ago! I did look nice then, if you like."

"Why nicer than now?"—(with a puzzled smile that both plays about his bearded lips and gayly shines in his steel-gray eyes).

"Oh, never mind! never mind!" reply I, in some confusion, "it is a long story; it is of no consequence, but I did."

He does not press for an explanation, for which I am obliged to him.

"Nancy!" he says, with a sort of hesitating joy, a diffident triumph in his voice, "do you know, I believe you have kept your promise! I believe, I really believe, that you are a little glad to see me!"

"Are you glad to see me, is more to the purpose?" return I, descending out of heaven with a pout, and returning to the small jealousies and acerbities of earth, and to the recollection of that yet unexplained alighting at Aninda's gate.

"Am I?"

He seems to think that no asseverations, no strong adjectives or intensifying adverbs, no calling upon sun and moon and stars to bear witness to his gladness, can increase the force of those two tiny words, so he adds none.

"I wonder, then," say I, in a rather sneaky and shamefaced manner, mumbling and looking down, "that you were not in a greater hurry to get to me?"

"In a greater hurry!" he repeats, in an accent of acute surprise. "Why, child, what are you talking about? Since we landed, I have neither slept nor eaten. I drove straight across London, and have been in the train ever since."

"But—between—this—and the—station?" suggest I, slowly, having taken hold of one of the buttons of his coat; the very one that in former difficulties I used always to resort to.

"You mean about my walking up?" he says readily, and without the slightest trace of guilty consciousness, indeed with a distinct and open look of pleasure; "but, my darling, how could I tell how long she would keep me? poor little woman!" (beginning to laugh and to put back the hair from his tanned forehead). "I am afraid I did not bless her when I saw her standing at her gate! I had half a mind to ask her whether another time would not do as well, but she looked so eager to hear about her husband—you know I have been seeing him at St. Thomas—such a wistful little face—and I knew that she could not keep me more than ten minutes; and, altogether when I thought of her loneliness and my own luck—"

He breaks off.

"Are you so sure she is lonely?" I say, with an innocent air of asking for information, and still working hard at the button; "are people always lonely when their husbands are away?"

He looks at me strangely for a moment; then, "Of course she is lonely, poor little thing!" he says, warmly; "how could she help it?"

A slight pause.

"Most men," say I, jealously, "would not have thought it a hardship to walk up and down between the laurustinus with Mrs. Zephine, I can tell you!"

"Would not they?" he answers, indifferently. "I dare say not! she always was a good little thing!"

"Excellent!" reply I, with a nasty dryness, "bland, passionate, and deeply religious!"

Again he looks at me in surprise—a surprise which, after a moment's reflection, melts and brightens into an expression of pleasure.

"Did you care so much about my coming that ten minutes seemed to make a difference?" he asks, in an eager voice. "Is it possible that you were in a hurry for me?"

Why cannot I speak truth, and say yes? Why does an objectlessly lying devil make its inopportune entry into me? Through some misplaced and crooked false shame I answer, "Not at all! not at all! of course a few minutes one way or the other could not make much difference; I was only puzzled to know what had become of you?"

He looks a shade disappointed, and for a moment we are both silent. We have sat down side by side on the sofa. Vick is standing on her hinder legs, with her forepaws rested on Roger's knee. Her tail is wagging with the strong and untiring regularity of a pendulum, and a smirk of welcome and recognition is on her face. Roger's arm is round me, and we are holding each other's hands, but we are no longer in heaven. I could not tell you why, but we are not. Some stupid constraint—quite of earth—has fallen upon me. Where are all those most tender words, those profuse endearments with which I meant to have greeted him?

"And so it is actually true!" he says, with a long-drawn sigh of relief; his eyes wandering round the room, and taking in all the familiar objects; "there is no mistake about it! I am actually holding your real live hand" (turning it gently about and softly considering the long slight fingers and pink palm)—"in mine! Ah! my dear, how often, how often I have held it so in my dreams! Have you ever" (speaking with a sort of doubtfulness and uncertain hope)—"have you ever—no, I dare say not—so held mine?"

The diffident passion in his voice for once destroys that vile constraint, dissipates that idiotic sense of bashfulness.

"Scores of times!" I answer, letting my head drop on his shoulder, and not taking the trouble to raise it again.

"I never used to think myself of a very nervous turn!" he says, presently, with a smile. "Nancy, you will laugh at me, but I assure you upon my honor that all the way home I have been in the most abject and deadly fright: at every puff of wind I thought we were infallibly going to the bottom: whenever the carriage rocked in the least to-day on the way down, I made up my mind we were going to smash! Little woman, what can a bit of a thing like you have done to me to make me seem so much more valuable to myself than I have ever done these eight-and-forty years?"

I think no answer to this so suitable and seemly as a dumb friction of my left cheek against the rough cloth of the shoulder on which it has reposed itself.

"Talk to me, Nancy!" he says, in a quiet half-whisper of happiness. "Let me hear the sound of your voice! I am sick of my own; I have had a glut of that all these weary eight months; tell me about them all! How are they all? how are the boys?" (with a playful smile of recollection at what used to be my one subject, the one theme on which I was wont to wax illimitably diffuse). But now, at the magic name no pleasant garrulity overcomes me; only the remembrance of my worries; of all those troubles that I mean now to transfer from my own to Roger's broad shoulders, swoop down upon me.

I raise my head and speak with a clouded brow and a complaining tone.

"The Brat has gone back to Oxford," I say, gloomily; "Bobby has gone to Hong-Kong, and Algy has gone to the dogs—or at least is going there as hard as he can!"

"To the dogs?" (with an accent of surprise and concern); "what do you mean? what has sent him there?"

"You had better ask Mrs. Zephine," reply I, bitterly, thinking, with a lively exasperation, of the changed and demoralized Algy I had last seen—soured, headstrong, and unhinged.

"Zephine!" (repeating the name with an accent of thorough astonishment), "what on earth can she have to say to it?"

"Ah, what?" reply I, with oracular spite; then, overcome with remorse at the thought of the way in which I was embittering the first moments of his return, I rebury my face in his shoulder.

"I will tell you about that to-morrow," I say; "to-day is a good day, and we will talk only of good things and of good people."

He does not immediately answer. My remark seems to have buried him in thought. Presently he shakes off his distraction and speaks again.

"And Barbara? how is she? She has not" (beginning to laugh)—"she has not gone to the dogs, I suppose!"

"No," say I, slowly, not thinking of what I am saying, but with my thoughts wandering off to the greatest and sorest of my afflictions, "not yet."

"And" (smiling) "your plan. See what a good memory I have—your plan of marrying her to Musgrave, how does that work?"

"My plan!" cry I, tremulously, while a sudden torrent of scarlet pours all over my face and neck. "I do not know what you are talking about! I never had any such plan! Phew!" (lifting up the arm that is round my waist, hastily removing it, rising and going to the window), "how hot this room grows of an afternoon!"



CHAPTER XXXV.

So the king enjoys his own again, and Roger is at home. Not yet—and now it is the next morning—has his return become real to me. Still there is something phantom and visionary about it: still it seems to me open to question whether, if I look away from him for a moment, he may not melt and disappear into dream-land.

All through breakfast I am dodging and peeping from behind the urn to assure myself of the continued presence and substantial reality of the strong shoulders and bronze-colored face that so solidly and certainly face me. As often as I catch his eye—and this is not seldom, for perhaps he too has his misgivings about me—I smile, in a manner, half ashamed, half sneaky, and yet most wholly satisfied.

The sun, who is not by any means always so well-judging, often hiding his face with both hands from a wedding, and hotly and gaudily flaming down on a black funeral, is shining with a temperate February comeliness in at our windows, on our garden borders; trying (and failing) to warm up the passionless melancholy of the chilly snow-drop families, trying (and succeeding) to add his quota to the joy that already fills and occupies our two hearts.

"How fine it is!" I cry, flying with unmatronly agility to the window, and playing a waltz on the pane. "That is right! I should have been so angry if it had rained; let us come out at once—I want to hear your opinion about the laurels; they want cutting badly, but I could not have them touched while you were away, though Bobby's fingers—when he was here—itched to be hacking at them. Come, I have got on my strong boots on purpose!—at once."

"At once?" he repeats, a little doubtfully turning over the letters that lie in a heap beside his plate. "Well, I do not know about that—duty first, and pleasure afterward. Had not I better go to Zephine Huntley's first, and get it over?"

"To Zephine Huntley's?" repeat I, my fingers suddenly breaking off in the middle of their tune, as I turn quickly round to face him; the smile disappearing from my face, and my jaw lengthening; "you do not mean to say that you are going there again?"

"Yes, again!" he answers, laughing a little, and slightly mimicking my tragic tone; "why not, Nancy?"

I make no answer. I turn away and look out; but I see a different landscape. It looks to me as if I were regarding it through dark-blue glass.

"I have got a whole sheaf of letters and papers from her husband for her," pursues Roger, apparently calmly, and utterly unaware of my discomfiture, "and I do not want to keep her out of them longer than I can help."

Still I make no rejoinder. My fingers stray idly up and down the glass; but it is no longer a giddy waltz that they are executing—if it is a tune at all, it is some little dirge.

"What has happened to you, Nancy?" says Roger, presently, becoming aware of my silence, rising and following me; "what are you doing—catching flies?"

"No," reply I, with an acrid smartness, "not I! I leave that to Mrs. Zephine."

Once again he regards me with that look of unfeigned surprise, tinged with a little pain which yesterday I detected on his face. When I look at him, when my eyes rest on the brave and open honesty of his, my ugly, nipping doubts disappear.

"Do not go," say I, standing on tiptoe, so that my hands may reach his neck, and clasp it, speaking in my most beguiling half-whisper; "why should you fetch and carry for her? let John or William take her letters. Are you so sure" (with an irresistible sneer) "that she is in such a hurry for them?—stay with me this one first day!—do, please—Roger."

It is the first time in all my history that I have succeeded in delivering myself of his Christian name to his face—frequently as I have fired it off in dialogues with myself, behind his back. It shoots out now with the loud suddenness of a mismanaged soda-water cork.

"Roger!" he repeats, in an accent of keen pleasure, catching me to his heart; "what! I am Roger, after all, am I? The 'general' has gone to glory at last, has he?—thank God!"

"I will ring and tell John at once," say I, with subtile amiability, disengaging myself from his arms, and walking quickly toward the bell.

"Stay!" he says, putting his hand on me in detention, before I have made two steps; "you must not! it is no use! John will not do, or William either: it is a matter of business. I have" (sighing) "to go through many of these papers with her."

"You?"

"Yes, I; why is that so surprising?"

"What possible concern is it of yours?" ask I, throwing the reins on the neck of my indignation, and urging that willing steed to a sharp gallop, crimsoning as I speak, and raising my voice, as has ever been our immemorial wont in home-broils. "For my part, I never saw any good come of people putting their fingers into their neighbors' pies!"

"Not even if those neighbors are the oldest friends they have in the world?" he says, gently, yet eying with some wonder—perhaps apprehension, for odd things frighten men—the small scarlet scold who stands swelling with ruffled feathers, and angry eyes, winking to keep the tears out of them, before him.

"I thought father was the oldest friend you had in the world!" say I, with a jealous tartness; "you always used to tell us so."

"Some of my oldest friends, then," he answers, looking a little amused, "since you will have me so exact."

"If Mrs. Huntley is the oldest friend you have in the world," say I, acrimoniously, still sticking to his first and most offensive form of expression, and heavily accenting it, "I wonder that you never happened to mention her existence before you went."

"So do I," he says, a little thoughtfully. "I am not much of a friend, am I? but—" (looking at me with that sincere and hearty tenderness which, as long as I am under its immediate influence, always disarms me) "my head was full of other things; and people drop out of one's life so; I had neither seen nor heard of her since—since she married."

("Since she was engaged to you," say I, mentally interlining this statement, "and threw you over because you were not rich enough! why cannot you be honest and say so?") but aloud I give utterance to nothing but a shrewish and disbelieving "Hm!"

A pause. I do not know what Roger is thinking of, but I am following out my own train of thought; the fruit of which is this observation, made with an air of reflection:

"Mr. Huntley is a very rich man, I suppose?"

Roger laughs.

"Rich! poor Huntley! that is the very last thing his worst enemy could accuse him of! why, he was obliged to run the constable two years ago."

"But I suppose," say I, slowly, "that he was better off—well off once—when she married him, for instance?"

"How did you know that?" he asks, a little surprised. "Who told you? Yes; at that time he was looked upon as quite a parti."

"Better off than you, I suppose?" say I, still speaking slowly, and reading the carpet. "I mean than you were then?"

Again he laughs.

"He might easily have been that? I had nothing but my younger son's portion and my pay; why, Nancy, I had an idea that I had told you that before."

"I dare say you did," reply I, readily, "but I like to hear it again."

Yet another pause.

"He is badly off now, then," say I, presently, with a faintly triumphant accent.

"About as badly off as it is possible to be," answers Roger, very gravely; "that is my business with his wife; she and I are trying to make an arrangement with his creditors, to enable him to come home."

"To come home!" echo I, raising my eyebrows in an artless astonishment; "but if he does come home, what will become of Algy and the rest of them?"

"The rest of whom?" asks Roger, but there is such a severity in his eye as he puts the question that it is not too much to say I dare not explain. The one thing hated of Roger's soul—the one thing for which he has no tolerance, and on which he brings to bear all the weight of his righteous wrath, is scandal. Not even me will he allow to nibble at a neighbor's fame.

"Is she much changed since you saw her last?" pursue I presently, with infantile guilelessness; "was her hair red then? some people say it used to be black!"

I raise my eyes to his face as I put this gentle query, in order the better to trace its effect; but the concern that I see in his countenance is so very much greater than any that I had intended to have summoned that I have no sooner hurled my dart than I repent me of having done it.

"Nancy!" he says, putting one hand under my chin, and stroking my hair with the other—"am I going to have a backbiting wife? Child! child! there was neither hatred nor malice in the little girl I found sitting at the top of the wall."

I do not answer.

"Nancy," he says again, in a voice of most thorough earnestness, "I have a favor to ask of you—I know when I put it that way, that you will not say 'No;' if you do not mind, I had rather you did not abuse Zephine Huntley!—for the matter of that, I had rather you did not abuse any one—it does not pay, and there is no great fun in it; but Zephine specially not."

"Why specially?" cry I, breathing short and speaking again with a quick, raised voice. "I know that it is a bad plan abusing people, you need not tell me that, I know it as well as you do, and I never did it at home, before I married, never!—none of them ever accused me of it—I was always quite good-natured about people, quite; but why she specially? why is she to be more sacred than any one else?"

"It is an old story," he answers, passing his hand across his forehead with what looks to me like a rather weary gesture and sighing, "I do not know why I did not tell you before—did not I ever?—no, by-the-by, I remember I never did; well, I will tell you now, and then you will understand!"

"Do not!" cry I, passionately, putting my fingers in my ears, and growing scarlet, while the tears rush in mad haste to my eyes, for I imagine that I well know what is coming. "I do not want to hear! I had rather not! I hate old stories." He looks at me in silent dismay. "I mean," say I, seeing that some explanation is needed, "that I know all about it!—I have heard it already! I have been told it."

"Been told it? By whom?"

"Never mind by whom!" reply I, removing my fingers from my ears, and covering with both hot hands my hotter face. "I have been told it! I have heard it, and, what is more, I will not hear it again!"



CHAPTER XXXVI.

When I rose this morning, I did not think that I should have cried before night; indeed, nothing would have seemed to me so unlikely. Cry! on the day of Roger's first back-coming! absurd! And yet now the morning is still quite young, and I have wept abundantly.

I am always rather good at crying. Tears with me do not argue any very profound depth of affliction. My tears have always been somewhat near my eyes, a fact well known to the boys, whom my pearly drops always leave as stolid and unfeeling as they found them. But the case is different with Roger. Either he is ignorant, or he has forgotten the facility with which I weep, and his distress is proportioned to his ignorance.

My eyes are dried again now, though they and my nose still keep a brave after-glow; and Roger and I are at one again. But, for my part, on this first day, I think it would have been pleasanter if we had never been at two. However, smiling peace is now again restored to us, and no one, to look at us, as we sit in my boudoir after breakfast, would think that we, or perhaps I should say I, had been so lately employed in chasing her away. As little would any one, looking at the blandness of Vick's profile, as she slumbers on the window-seat in the sun, conjecture of her master-passion for the calves of strangers' legs.

"So you see that I must go, Nancy," says Roger, with a rather wistful appeal to my reason, of whose supremacy he is not, perhaps, quite so confident as he was when he got up this morning. "You understand, don't you, dear?"

I nod.

"Yes, I understand."

I still speak in a subdued and snuffly voice, but the wrath has gone out of me.

"Well, you—would you mind," he says, speaking rather hesitatingly, as not quite sure of the reception that his proposition may meet with—"would you mind coming with me as far as Zephine's?"

"Do you mean come all the way, and go in with you, and stay while you are there?" cry I, with great animation, as a picture of the strict supervision which, by this course of conduct, I shall be enabled to exercise over Mrs. Zephine's oscillades, poses, and little verbal tendernesses, flashes before my mind's eye.

Roger looks down.

"I do not know about that," he says, slowly. "Perhaps she would not care to go into her husband's liabilities before a—a str—before a third person!"

"Two is company and three is none, in fact," say I, with a slight relapse into the disdainful and snorting mood.

He looks distressed, but attempts no argument or explanation.

"How far did you mean me to come, then?" say I, half ashamed of my humors, but still with an after-thought of pettishness in my voice. "Escort you to the hall-door, I suppose, and kick my heels among the laurestines until such time as all Mr. Huntley's bills are paid?"

He turns away.

"It is of no consequence," he says, with a slight shade of impatience, and a stronger shade of disappointment in his voice. "I see that you do not wish it, but what I meant was, that you might have walked with me as far as the gate, so that on this first day we might lose as little of each other's society as possible."

"And so I will!" cry I, impulsively, with a rush of tardy repentance. "I—I—meant to come all along. I was only—only—joking!"

But to both of us it seems but a sorry jest. We set forth, and walk side by side through the park. Both of us are rather silent. Yes, though we have eight months' arrears of talk to make up, though it seemed to me before he came that in a whole long life there would scarce be time for all the things I had to say to him, yet, now that we are reunited, we are stalking dumbly along through the withered white grass, pallid from the winter storms. Certainly, we neither of us could say any thing so well worth hearing as what the lark, in his most loud and godly joy, is telling us from on high. Perhaps it is the knowledge of this that ties our tongues.

The sun shines on our heads. He has not much power yet, but great good-will. And the air is almost as gentle as June. We have left our own domain behind us, and have reached Mrs. Huntley's white gate. Through the bars I see the sheltered laurestines all ablow.

"May I wait for you here?" say I, with diffident urgency, reflecting hopefully, as I make the suggestion, on the wholesome effect, on the length of the interview that the knowledge of my being, flattening my nose against the bars of the gate all through it, must necessarily have.

Again he looks down, as if unwilling to meet my appealing eyes.

"I think not, Nancy," he answers, reluctantly. "You see, I cannot possibly tell how long I might be obliged to keep you waiting."

"I do not mind waiting at all," persist I, eagerly. "I am not very impatient; I shall not expect you to be very quick, and" (going on very fast, to hinder him from the second refusal which I see hovering on his lips), "and it is not at all cold; just now you yourself said that you had felt many a chillier May-day, and I am so warmly wrapped up, pet!" (taking hold of one of his fingers, and making it softly travel up and down the fur of my thick coat).

He shakes his head, with a gesture unwilling, yet decided.

"No, Nancy, it could not be! I had rather that you would go home."

"I have no doubt you would!" say I, turning sharply and huffily away; then, with a sudden recollecting and repenting myself, "May I come back, then?" I say, meekly. "Come and fetch you, I mean, after a time—any long time that you like!"

"Will you?" he cries, with animation, the look of unwilling refusal vanishing from his face. "Would you like? would not it be too much trouble?"

"Not at all! not at all!" reply I, affably. "How soon, then?" (taking out my watch); "in half an hour?"

Again his face falls a little.

"I think it must be longer than that, Nancy."

"An hour, then?" say I, lifting a lengthened countenance wistfully to his; "people may do a good deal in an hour, may not they?"

"Had not we better be on the safe side, and say an hour and a half?" suggests he, but somewhat apprehensively—or I imagine so. "I shall be sure not to keep you a minute then—I do not relish the notion of my wife's tramping up and down this muddy road all by herself."

"And I do not relish the notion of my husband—" return I, beginning to speak very fast, and then suddenly breaking off—"Well, good-by!"

"Say, good-by, Roger," cries he, catching my hand in detention, as I turn away. "Nancy, if you knew how fond I have grown of my own name! In despite of Tichborne, I think it lovely."

I laugh.

"Good-by, Roger!"

He has opened the gate, and turned in. I watch him, as he walks with long, quick steps, up the little, trim swept drive. As I follow him with my eyes, a devil enters into me. I cry—

"Roger!"

He turns at once.

"Ask her to show you Algy's bracelet," I say, with an awkward laugh; and then, thoroughly afraid of the effect of my bomb-shell, and not daring to see what sort it is, I turn and run quickly away.

The end of the hour and a half finds me punctually peering through the bars again. Well, I am first at the rendezvous. This, perhaps, is not very surprising, as I have not given him one moment's law. For the first five minutes, I am very fairly happy and content. The lark is still fluttering in strong rapture up in the heights of the sky; and for these five minutes I listen to him, soothed and hallowed. But, after they are past, it is different. God's bird may be silent, as far as I am concerned: not a verse more of his clear psalm do I hear. An uneasy devil of jealousy has entered into me, and stopped my ears. I take hold of the bars of the gate, and peer through, as far as my head will go: then I open it, and, stealing on tiptoe up the drive a little way, to the first corner, look warily round it. Not a sign of him! Not a sound! Not even a whisper of air to rustle the glistening laurel-leaves, or stir the flat laurestine-sprays.

I return to the road, and inculcate patience on myself. Why may not I take a lesson in easy-mindedness from Vick? Was not it Hartley Coleridge who suggested that perhaps dogs have a language of smell; and that what to us is a noisome smell, is to them a beautiful poem? If so, Vick is searching for lyrics and epics in the ditch. I stroll along the wintry brown hedge-row, and begin to pick Roger a little, scant nosegay. He shall see how patient I am! how unsulky! with what sunny mildness I can wait his leisure! I have already two or three snow-drops in my breast, that I picked as I came through the garden. To these I add a drooping hazel-tassel or two, and a little bit of honeysuckle-leaf, just breaking greenly into life. This is all I can find—all the scentless first-fruits of the baby year.

It is ten minutes past the due time now. Again I listen intently, as I listened yesterday, for his coming. There is a sound now; but, alas! not the right one! It is the rumbling of an approaching carriage. A pony-chaise bowls past. The occupants are acquaintances of mine, and we bow and smile to each other. As long as they are in sight, I affect to be diligently botanizing in the hedge. When they have disappeared, I sit down on a heap of stones, and take out my watch for the hundredth time; a whole quarter of an hour!

"He does not relish the notion of his wife's tramping up and down this muddy road by herself, does not he?" say I, speaking out loud, and gnashing my teeth.

Then I hurl my little posy away from me into the mud, as far as it will go. What has become of my patience? my sunny mildness? Then, as the recollection of the velvet-gown and mob-cap episode recurs to me, I repent me, and, crossing the road, pick up again my harmless catkins and snow-drops, and rearrange them. I have hardly finished wiping the mire from the tender, lilac-veined snow-drop petals, before I hear his voice in the distance, in conversation with some one. Clearly, Delilah is coming to see the last of him! I expect that she mostly escorts them to the gate. In my present frame of mind, it would be physically impossible for me to salute her with the bland civility which society enjoins on people of our stage of civilization. I therefore remain sitting on my heap.

Presently, Roger emerges alone. He does not see me at first, but looks up the road, and down the road, in search of me. When, at last, he perceives me, no smile—(as has ever hitherto been his wont)—kindles his eyes and lips. With unstirred gravity, he approaches me.

"Here you are at last!" cry I, scampering to meet him, but with a stress, from which human nature is unable to refrain, on the last two words.

"At last?" he repeats in a tone of surprise; "am I over time?—Yes"—(looking at his watch)—"so I am! I had no idea of it; I hope you have not been long waiting."

"I was here to the minute," reply I, curtly; and again my tongue declines to refrain from accentuation.

"I beg your pardon!" he says, still speaking with unnecessary seriousness, as it seems to me, "I really had no idea of it."

"I dare say not," say I, with a little wintry grin; "I never heard that they had a clock in paradise."

"In paradise!" he repeats, looking at me strangely with his keen, clear eyes, that seem to me to have less of a caress in them than they ever had before on meeting mine. "What has paradise to say to it? Do you imagine that I have been in paradise since I left you here?"

"I do not know, I am sure!" reply I, rather confused, and childishly stirring the stiff red mud with the end of my boot, "I believe they mostly do; Algy does—" then afraid of drawing down the vial of his wrath on me a second time for my scandal-mongering propensities, I go on quickly; "Were you talking to yourself as you came down the drive? I heard your voice as if in conversation. I sometimes talk to myself when I am by myself, quite loud."

"Do you? I do not think I do; at least I am not aware of it; I was talking to Zephine."

"Why did not she come to the gate, then?" inquire I, tartly; "did she know I was there? did not she want to see me?"

"I do not know; I did not ask her."

I look up at him in strong surprise. We are in the park now—our own unpeopled, silent park, where none but the deer can see us; and yet he has not offered me the smallest caress; not once has he called me "Nancy;" he, to whom hitherto my homely name has appeared so sweet. It is only an hour and three-quarters since I parted from him, and yet in that short space an indisputable shade—a change that exits not only in my imagination, but one that no most careless, superficial eye could avoid seeing—has come over him. Face, manner, even gait, are all altered, I think of Algy—Algy as he used to be, our jovial pet and playfellow, Algy as he now is, soured, sulky, unloving, his very beauty dimmed by discontent and passion. Is this the beginning of a like change in Roger?

A spasm of jealous agony, of angry despair, contracts my heart as I think this.

"Well, are all Mr. Huntley's debts paid?" I ask, trying to speak in a tone of sprightly ease; "is there a good hope of his coming back soon?"

"Not yet a while; in time, perhaps, he may."

Still there is not a vestige of a smile on his face. He does not look at me as he speaks; his eyes are on the long, dead knots of the colorless grass at his feet; in his expression despondency and preoccupation strive for supremacy.

"Have you made your head ache?" I say, gently stealing my hand into his; "there is nothing that addles the brains like muddling over accounts, is there?"

Am I awake? Can I believe it? He has dropped my hand, as if he disliked the touch of it.

"No, thanks, no. I have no headache," he answers, hastily.

Another little silence. We are marching quickly along, as if our great object were to get our tete-a-tete over. As we came, we dawdled, stood still to listen to the lark, to look at the wool-soft cloud-heaps piled in the west—on any trivial excuse indeed; but now all these things are changed.

"Did you talk of business all the time?" I ask, by-and-by, with timid curiosity.

It is not my fancy; he does plainly hesitate.

"Not quite all," he answers, in a low voice, and still looking away from me.

"About what, then?" I persist, in a voice through whose counterfeit playfulness I myself too plainly hear the unconquerable tremulousness; "may not I hear?—or is it a secret?"

He does not answer; it seems to me that he is considering what response to make.

"Perhaps," say I, still with a poor assumption of lightness and gayety, "perhaps you were talking of—of old times."

He laughs a little, but whose laugh has he borrowed? in that dry, harsh tone there is nothing of my Roger's mellow mirth!

"Not we; old times must take care of themselves; one has enough to do with the new ones, I find."

"Did she—did she say any thing to you about—about Algy, then?"—hesitatingly.

"We did not mention his name."

There is something so abrupt and trenchant in his tone that I have not the spirit to pursue my inquiries any further. In deep astonishment and still deeper mortification, I pursue my way in silence.

Suddenly Roger comes to a stand-still.

"Nancy!" he says, in a voice that is more like his own, stopping and laying his hands on my shoulders; while in his eyes is something of his old kindness; yet not quite the old kindness either; there is more of unwilling, rueful yearning in them than there ever was in that—"Nancy, how old are you?—nineteen, is it not?"

"Very nearly twenty," reply I, cheerfully, for he has called me "Nancy," and I hail it as a sign of returning fine weather; "we may call it twenty; will not it be a comfort when I am well out of my teens?"

"And I am forty-eight," he says, as if speaking more to himself than to me, and sighing heavily; "it is a monstrous, an unnatural disparity!"

"It is not nearly so bad as if it were the other way," reply I, laughing gayly; "I forty-eight, and you twenty, is it?"

"My child! my child!"—speaking with an accent of, to me, unaccountable suffering—"what possessed me to marry you? why did not I adopt you instead? It would have been a hundred times more seemly!"

"It is a little late to think of that now, is not it?" I say, with an uncomfortable smile; then I go on, with an uneasy laugh, "that was the very idea that occurred to us the first night you arrived; at least, it never struck us as possible that you would take any notice of me, but we all said what a good thing it would be for the family if you would adopt Barbara or the Brat."

"Did you?" (very quickly, in a tone of keen pain); "it struck you all in the same light then?"

"But that was before we had seen you," I answer, hastily, repenting my confession as soon as I see its effects. "When we had, we soon changed our tune."

"If I had adopted you," he pursues, still looking at me with the same painful and intent wistfulness, "if I had been your father, you would have been fond of me, would not you? Not afraid of me—not afraid to tell me any thing that most nearly concerned you—you would perhaps"—(with a difficult smile)—"you would perhaps have made me your confidant, would you, Nancy?"

I look up at him in utter bewilderment.

"What are you talking about? Why do I want a confidant? What have I to confide? What have I to tell any one?"

Our eyes are resting on each other, and, as I speak, I feel his go with clean and piercing search right through mine into my soul. In a moment I think of Musgrave, and the untold black tale now forever in my thought attached to him, and, as I so think, the hot flush of agonized shame that the recollection of him never fails to call to my face, invades cheeks, brow, and throat. To hide it, I drop my head on Roger's breast. Shall I tell him now, this instant? Is it possible that he has already some faint and shadowy suspicion of the truth—some vague conjecture concerning it, as something in his manner seems to say? But no! it is absolutely impossible! Who, with the best will in the world, could have told him? Is not the tale safely buried in the deep grave of Musgrave's and my two hearts?

I raise my head, and twice essay to speak. Twice I stop, choked. How can I put into words the insult I have received? How can I reveal to him the slack levity, the careless looseness, with which I have kept the honor confided to me?

As my eyes stray helplessly round in a vain search for advice or help from the infinite unfeeling apathy of Nature, I catch sight of the distant chimneys of the abbey! How near it is! After all, why should I sow dissension between such close neighbors? why make an irreparable breach between two families, hitherto united by the kindly ties of mutual friendship and good-will?

Frank is young, very young; he has been—so Roger himself told me—very ill brought up. Perhaps he has already repented, who knows? I try to persuade myself that these are the reasons—and sufficient reasons—of my silence, and I take my resolution afresh. I will be dumb. The flush slowly dies out of my face, and, when I think it is almost gone, I venture to look again at Roger. I think that his eyes have never left me. They seem to be expecting me to speak, but, as I still remain silent, he turns at length away, and also gently removes his hands from my shoulders. We stand apart.

"Well, Nancy," he says, sighing again, as if from the bottom of his soul, "my poor child, it is no use talking about it. I can never be your father now."

"And a very good thing too!" rejoin I, with a dogged stoutness. "I do not see what I want with two fathers; I have always found one amply enough—quite as much as I could manage, in fact."

He seems hardly to be listening to me. He has dropped his eyes on the ground, and is speaking more to himself than to me.

"Husband and wife we are!" he says, with a slow depression of tone, "and, as long as God's and man's laws stand, husband and wife we must remain!"

"You are not very polite," I cry, with an indignant lump rising in my throat; "you speak as if you were sorry for it—are you?"

He lifts his eyes again, and again their keen search investigates the depths of my soul; but no human eye can rightly read the secrets of any other human spirit; they find what they expect to find, not what is there. Clear and cuttingly keen as they are, Roger's eyes do not read my soul aright.

"Are you, Nancy?"

"If you are, I am," I reply, with a half-smothered sob.

He makes no rejoinder, and we begin again to walk along homeward, but slowly this time.

"We have made a mistake, perhaps," he says, presently, still speaking with the same slow and ruminating sadness in his tone. "The inscrutable God alone knows why He permits his creatures to mar all their seventy years by one short false step—yes—a mistake!"

(Ah me! ah me! I always mistrusted those laurestines! They sent me back my brother churlish and embittered, but oh! that in my steadfast Roger they should have worked such a sudden deadly change!)

"Is it more a mistake," I cry, bursting out into irrepressible anger, "than it was two hours ago, when I left you at that gate? You did not seem to think it a mistake then—at least you hid it very well, if you did"—(then going on quickly, seeing that he is about to interrupt me)—"have you been comparing notes, pray? Has she found it a mistake, too?"

"Yes, that she has! Poor soul! God help her!" he answers, compassionately.

Something in the pity of his tone jars frightfully on my strung nerves.

"If God has to help all the poor souls who have made mistakes, He will have his hands full!" I retort, bitterly.

Another silence. We are drawing near the pleasure-grounds—the great rhododendron belt that shelters the shrubbery from the east wind.

"Nancy," says Roger, again stopping, and facing me too. This time he does not put his hands on my shoulders; the melancholy is still in his eyes, but there is no longer any harshness. They repossess their natural kindly benignity. "Though it is perhaps impossible that there should be between us that passionate love that there might be between people that are nearer each other in age—more fitly mated—yet there is no reason why we should not like each other very heartily, is there, dear? why there should not be between us absolute confidence, perfect frankness—that is the great thing, is not it?"

He is looking with such intense wistfulness at me, that I turn away. Why should not there be passionate love between us? Who is there but himself to hinder it? So I make no answer.

"I dare say," he says, taking my right hand, and holding it with a cool and kindly clasp, "that you think it difficult—next door to impossible—for two people, one at the outset, one almost on the confines of life, to enter very understandingly into each other's interests! No doubt the thought that I—being so much ahead of you in years"—(sighing again heavily)—"cannot see with your eyes, or look at things from your stand-point—would make it harder for you to come to me in your troubles; but indeed, dear, if you believe me, I will try, and, as we are to spend our lives together, I think it would be better, would not it?"

He speaks with a deprecating humility, an almost imploring gentleness, but I am so thoroughly upset by the astounding change that has come over the tone of his talk—by the clouds that have suddenly darkened the morning sunshine of my horizon—that I cannot answer him in the same tone.

"Perhaps we shall not have to spend all our lives together!" I say, with a harsh laugh. "Cheer up! One of us may die! who knows?"

After that we neither of us say any thing till we reach the house.



CHAPTER XXXVII.

"Yea, by God's rood, I trusted you too well!"

In the hall we part without a word, and I, spiritlessly, mount the staircase alone. How I flew down it this morning, three steps at a time, and had some ado to hinder myself from sliding down the banisters, as we have all often, with dangerous joy, done at home! Now I crawl up, like some sickly old person. When I reach my bedroom, I throw myself into the first chair, and lie in it—

"... quiet as any water-sodden log Stayed in the wandering warble of a brook."

I do not attempt to take off my hat and jacket. Of what use is it to take them off more than to leave them on, or to leave them on more than to take them off? Of what use is any thing, pray? What a weary round life is! what a silly circle of unfortunate repetitions! eating only to be hungry again; waking only to sleep; sleeping only to wake!

At first I am too inert even to think, even to lift my hand to protect my cheek from Vick's muddy paws, who, annoyed at my evident inattention to her presence, is sitting on my lap, making little impatient clawings at my defenseless countenance. But gradually on the river of recollection all the incidents of the morning flow through my mind. In more startling relief than ever, the astounding change in Roger, wrought by those ill-starred two hours, stands out. Is it possible that I may have been attributing it to a wrong cause? Doubtless, the first interview with the woman he had loved, and who had thrown him over (by-the-by, how forgiving men are!)—yes, the first, probably, since they had stood in the relation of betrothed people to each other—must have been full of pain. Doubtless, the contrast between the crude gawkiness of the raw girl he has drifted into marrying—for I suppose it was more accident than any thing else—with the mature and subtile grace, the fine and low-voiced sweetness of the woman whom his whole heart and soul and taste chose and approved, must have struck him with keen force. I expected that: it would not have taken me by surprise. If he had emerged from among the laurestines, depressed, and vainly struggling for a factitious cheerfulness, I think I could have understood it. I think I could have borne with it, could have tried meekly to steal back into his heart again, to win him back, in despite of ignorance, gawkiness, and all other my drawbacks, by force of sheer love.

But the change was surely too abrupt to be accounted for on this hypothesis. Would Roger, my pattern of courtesy—Roger, who shrinks from hurting the meanest beggar's feelings—would he, in such plain terms, have deplored and wished undone our marriage, if it were only suffering to himself that it had entailed? Has his unselfish chivalry gone the way of Algy's brotherly love? Impossible! the more I think of it, the more unlikely it seems—the more certain it appears to me that I must look elsewhere for the cause of the alteration that has so heavily darkened my day.

I have risen, and am walking quickly up and down. I have shaken off my stolid apathy, or, rather, it has fallen off of itself. Can she have told him any ill tales of me? any thing to my disadvantage? Instantly the thought of Musgrave—the black and heavy thought that is never far from the portals of my mind—darts across me, and, at the same instant, like a flash of lightning, the recollection of my meeting her on the fatal evening, just as (with tear-stained, swollen face) I had parted from Frank—of the alert and lively interest in her eyes, as she bowed and smiled to me, flames with sudden illumination into my soul. Still I can hardly credit it. It would, no doubt, be pleasant to her to sow dissension between us, but would even she dare to carry ill tales of a wife to a husband? And even supposing that she had, would he attach so much importance to my being seen with wet cheeks? I, who cry so easily—I, who wept myself nearly blind when Jacky caught his leg in the snare? If he thinks so much of that part of the tale, what would he think of the rest?

As I make this reflection I shudder, and again congratulate myself on my silence. For beyond our parting, and my tears, it is impossible that she can have told him aught.

Men are not prone to publish their own discomfitures; even I know that much. I exonerate Mr. Musgrave from all share in making it known—and have the mossed tree-trunks lips? or the loud brook an articulate tongue? Thank God! thank God! no! Nature never blabs. With infinite composure, with a most calm smile she listens, but she never tells again.

A little reassured by this thought, I resolve to remain in doubt no longer than I can help, but to ascertain, if necessary, by direct inquiry, whether my suspicions are correct. This determination is no sooner come to than it puts fresh life and energy into my limbs. I take off my hat and jacket, smooth my hair, and prepare with some alacrity for luncheon.

It is evening, however, before I have an opportunity of putting my resolve in practice. At luncheon, there are the servants; all afternoon, Roger is closeted with his agent: before we set off this morning, he never mentioned the agent: he never figured at all in our day's plan—(I imagined that he was to be kept till to-morrow); and at dinner there are the servants again. Thank God, they are gone now! We are alone, Roger and I. We are sitting in my boudoir, as in my day-dreams, before his return, I had pictured us; but, alas! where is caressing proximity which figured in all my visions? where is the stool on which I was to sit at his feet, with head confidently leaned on his arm? As it happens, Vick is sitting on the stool, and we occupy two arm-chairs, at civil distance from each other, much as if we had been married sixty years, and had hated each other for fifty-nine of them. I am idly fiddle-faddling with a piece of work, and Roger—is it possible?—is stretching out his hand toward a book.

"You do not mean to say that you are going to read?" I say, in a tone of sharp vexation.

He lays it down again.

"If you had rather talk, I will not."

"I am afraid," say I, with a sour laugh, "that you have not kept much conversation for home use! I suppose you exhausted it all, this morning, at Laurel Cottage!"

He passes his hand slowly across his forehead.

"Perhaps!—I do not think I am in a very talking vein."

"By-the-by," say I, my heart beating thick, and with a hurry and tremor in my voice, as I approach the desired yet dreaded theme, "you have never told me what it was, besides Mr. Huntley's debts, that you talked of this morning!—you owned that you did not talk of business quite all the time!"

"Did I?"

He has forgotten his book now; across the flame of the candles, he is looking full and steadily at me.

"When I asked you, you said it was not about old times?—of course—" (laughing acridly)—"I can imagine your becoming illimitably diffuse about them, but you told me, that, 'No,' you did not mention them."

"I told truth."

"You also said," continue I, with my voice still trembling, and my pulses throbbing, "that it was not Algy that you were discussing!—if I had been in your place, I could, perhaps, have found a good deal to say about him; but you told me that you never mentioned him."

"We did not."

"Then what did you talk about?" I ask, in strong excitement; "it must have been a very odd theme that you find such difficulty in repeating."

Still he is looking, with searching gravity, full in my face.

"Do you really wish to know?"

I cannot meet his eyes: something in me makes me quail before them. I turn mine away, but answer, stoutly:

"Yes, I do wish. Why should I have asked, if I did not?"

Still he says nothing: still I feel, though I am not looking at him, that his eyes are upon me.

"Was it—" say I, unable any longer to bear that dumb gaze, and preferring to take the bull by the horns, and rush on my fate—"was it any thing about me? has she been telling you any tales of—of—me?"

No answer! No sound but the clock, and Vick's heavy breathing, as she peacefully snores on the footstool. I cannot bear the suspense. Again I lift my eyes, and look at him. Yes, I am right! the intense anxiety—the overpowering emotion on his face tell me that I have touched the right string.

"Are there—are there—are you aware that there are any tales that she could tell of you?"

Again I laugh harshly.

"Ha! ha! if we came to mutual anecdotes, I am not quite sure that I might not have the best of it!"

"That is not the question," he replies, in a voice so exceedingly stern, so absolutely different from any thing I have ever hitherto contemplated as possible in my gentle, genial Roger, that again, to the depths of my soul, I quail; how could I ever, in wildest dreams, have thought I should dare to tell him?—"it is nothing to me what tales you can tell of her!—she is not my wife!—what I wish to know—what I will know, is, whether there is any thing that she could say of you!"

For a moment, I do not answer. I cannot. A coward fear is grasping my heart with its clammy hands. Then—

"Could!" say I, shrugging my shoulders, and feebly trying to laugh derisively; "of course she could! it would be difficult to set a limit to the powers of a lady of her imagination!"

"What do you mean?" he cries, quickly, and with what sounds like a sort of hope in his voice; "have you any reason—any grounds for thinking her inventive?"

I do not answer directly.

"It is true, then," I cry, with flashing eyes, and in a voice of great and indignant anguish. "I have not been mistaken! I was right! Is it possible that you, who, only this morning, warned me with such severity against backbiting, have been calmly listening to scandalous tales about me from a stranger?"

He does not interrupt me: he is listening eagerly, and that sort of hope is still in his face.

"I knew it would come, sooner or later," I continue, speaking excitedly, and with intense bitterness, "sooner or later, I knew that it would be a case of Algy over again! but I did not—did not think that it would have been quite so soon! Great Heaven!" (smiting my hands sharply together, and looking upward), "I have fallen low! to think that I should come to be discussed by you with her!"

"I have not discussed you with her," he answers, very solemnly, and still looking at me with that profound and greedy eagerness in his eyes; "with no living soul would I discuss my wife—I should have hardly thought I need tell you that! What I heard, I heard by accident. She—as I believe, in all innocence of heart—referred to—the—the—circumstance, taking it for granted that I knew it—that you had told me of it, and I—I—" (raising his clinched right hand to emphasize his speech)—"I take God to witness, I had no more idea to what she was alluding—as soon as I understood—she must have thought me very dull—" (laughing hoarsely)—"for it was a long time before I took it in—but as soon as I understood to what manner of anecdote it was that she was referring—then, at once, I bade her be silent!—not even with her, would I talk over my wife!"

He stops. He has risen from his chair, and is now standing before me. His breath comes quick and panting; and his face is not far from being as white as mine.

"But what I have learned," he continues presently, in a low voice, that, by a great effort, he succeeds in making calm and steady, "I cannot again unlearn! I would not if I could!—I have no desire to live in a fool's paradise! I tried hard this morning—God knows what constraint I had to put upon myself—to induce you to tell me of your own accord—to volunteer it—but you would not—you were resolutely silent. Why were you? Why were you?" (breaking off with an uncontrollable emotion). "I should not have been hard upon you—I should have made allowances. God knows we all need it!"

I sit listening in a stony silence: every bit of me seems turned into cold rock.

"But now," he says, regathering his composure, and speaking with a resolute, stern quiet; "I have no other resource—you have left me none—but to come to you, and ask point-blank, is this true, or is it false?"

For a moment, my throat seems absolutely stopped up, choked; there seems no passage for my voice, through its dry, parched gates. Then at length I speak faintly: "Is what true? is what false? I suppose you will not expect me to deny it, before I know what it is?"

He does not at once answer. He takes a turn once or twice up and down the silent room, in strong endeavor to overcome and keep down his agitation, then he returns and speaks; with a face paler, indeed, than I could have imagined any thing so bronzed could be; graver, more austere than I ever thought I should see it, but still without bluster or hectoring violence.

"Is it true, then?" he says, speaking in a very low key. "Great God! that I should have to put such a question to my wife; that one evening, about a week ago, on the very day, indeed, that the news of my intended return arrived, you were seen parting with—with—Musgrave" (he seems to have an intense difficulty in pronouncing the name) "at or after nightfall, on the edge of Brindley Wood, he in a state of the most evident and extreme agitation, and you in floods of tears!—is it true, or is it false?—for God's sake, speak quickly!"

But I cannot comply with his request. I am gasping. His eyes are upon me, and, at every second's delay, they gather additional sternness. Oh, how awful they are in their just wrath! When was father, in his worst and most thunderous storms, half so dreadful? half so awe-inspiring?

"What sort of an interview could it have been to which there was such a close?" he says, as if making the reflection more to himself than to me; "speak! is it true?"

I can no longer defer my answer. One thing or another I must say: both eyes and lips imperatively demand it. Twice, nay thrice I struggle—struggle mightily to speak, and speak well and truly, and twice, nay, three times, that base fear strangles my words. Then, at length—O friends! do not be any harder upon me than you can help, for indeed, indeed I have paid sorely for it, and it is the first lie that ever I told; then, at length, with a face as wan as the ashes of a dead fire—with trembling lips, and a faint, scarcely audible voice, I say, "No, it is not true!"

"Not true?" he echoes, catching up my words quickly; but in his voice is none of the relief, the restored amenity that I had looked for, and for the hope of which I have perjured myself; equally in voice and face, there is only a deep and astonished anger.

"Not true!—you mean to say that it is false!"

"Yes, false!" I repeat in a sickly whisper. Oh, why, if I must lie, do not I do it with a bold and voluble assurance? whom would my starved pinched falsehood deceive?

"You mean to say," speaking with irrepressible excitement, while the wrathful light gathers and grows intenser in the gray depths of his eyes, "that this—this interview never took place? that it is all a delusion; a mistake?"

"Yes."

I repeat it mechanically now. Having gone thus far, I must go on, but I feel giddy and sick, and my hands grasp the arms of my chair. I feel as if I should fall out of it if they did not.

"You are sure?" speaking with a heavy emphasis, and looking persistently at me, while the anger of his eyes is dashed and crossed by a miserable entreaty. Ah! if they had had that look at first, I could have told him. "Are you sure?" he repeats, and I, driven by the fates to my destruction, while God hides his face from me, and the devil pushes me on, answer hazily, "Yes, quite sure!"

Then he asks me no more questions; he turns and slowly leaves the room, and I know that I have lied in vain!



CHAPTER XXXVIII.

And thus I, ingenious architect of my own ruin, build up the barrier of a lie between myself and Roger. It is a barrier that hourly grows higher, more impassable. As the days go by, I say to myself in heart-sickness, that I shall never now cross it—never see it leveled with the earth. Even when we too are dead it will still rise between us in the other world; if—as all the nations have agreed to say—there be another. For my part, I think at this time that, if there is any chance of its bearing aught of resemblance to this present world, I had far fainer there were none.

With all due deference to Shakespeare—and I suppose that even the one supreme genius of all time must, in his day, have made a mistake or two—I have but faint belief in the "sweet uses of adversity." I think that they are about as mythical as the jewels in the toad's ugly skull, to which he likened them. It is in prosperity that one looks up, with leaping heart and clear eyes, and through the clouds see God sitting throned in light. In adversity one sees nothing but one's own dunghill and boils.

At least such has been my experience. I think I could have borne it better if I had not looked forward to his return so much—if he had been an austere and bitter tyrant, to whose coming I had looked with dread, I could have braced my nerves and pulled myself together, to face with some stoutness the hourly trials of life. But when one has counted the days, hours, and moments, till some high festival, and, when it comes, it turns out a drear, black funeral, one cannot meet the changed circumstances with any great fortitude.

It is the horrible contrast between my dreams and their realization that gives the keenest poignancy to my pangs.

To his return I had referred the smoothing of all my difficulties, the clearing up of all my doubts, the sweeping of all clouds from my sky; and now he is back! and, oh, how far, far gloomier than ever is my weather! What a sullen leaden sky overhangs me!

I never tell him about Algy after all! I do not often laugh now; but I did laugh loudly and long the other day, although I was quite alone, when I thought of my wily purpose of setting Roger on his guard against Mrs. Huntley's little sugared unveracities.

No, I never tell him about Algy! Why should I? it would be wasted breath—spent words. He would not believe me. In the more important case has not he taken her word in preference to mine? Would not he in this too? For I know that he knows, as well as I know it myself, that in that matter I lied.

Sometimes, when I am by myself, a mighty yearning—a most constraining longing seizes me to go to him—fall at his feet, and tell him the truth even yet. After all, God knows that I have no ugly fault to confess to him—no infidelity even of thought. But as soon as I am in his presence the desire fades; or at least the power to put it in practice melts away. For he never gives me an opening. After that first evening never does he draw nigh the subject: never once is the detested name of Musgrave mentioned between us. If he had been one most dear to us both and had died untimely, we could not avoid with more sacred care any allusion to him. And, even if, by doing infinite violence to myself, I could bring myself to overcome the painful steepness of the hill of difficulty that lies between me and the subject, and tell the tardy truth, to what use, pray? Having once owned that I had lied, could I resent any statement of mine being taken with distrust? Would he believe me? Not he! He would say, "If you were as innocent as you say, why did you lie? If you were innocent, what had you to fear?" So I hold my peace. And, as the days go, and the winter wanes, it seems to me that I can plainly see, with no uncertain or doubtful eyes, Roger's love wane too.

After all, why should I wonder? I may be sorry, for who ever saw gladly love—the one all-good thing on this earth, most of whose good things are adulterated and dirt-smirched—who ever saw it gladly slip away from them? But I cannot be surprised.

With Roger, love and trust must ever go hand-in-hand; and, when the one has gone, the other must needs soon follow.

After all, what he loved in me was a delusion—had never existed. It was my blunt honesty, my transparent candor, the open-hearted downrightness that in me amounted to a misfortune, that had at first attracted him. And now that he has found that the unpolished abruptness of my manners can conceal as great an amount of deception as the most insinuating silkiness of any one else's, I do not see what there is left in me to attract him. Certainly I have no beauty to excite a man's passions, nor any genius to enchain his intellect, nor even any pretty accomplishment to amuse his leisure.

Why should he love me? Because I am his wife? Nay, nay! who ever loved because it was their duty? who ever succeeded in putting love in harness, and driving him? Sooner than be the object of such up-hill conscientious affection, I had far rather be treated with cold indifference—active hatred even. Because I am young? That seems no recommendation in his eyes! Because I love him? He does not believe it. Once or twice I have tried to tell him so, and he has gently pooh-poohed me.

Sometimes it has occurred to me that, perhaps, if I had him all to myself, I might even yet bring him back to me—might reconcile him to my paucity of attractions, and persuade him of my honesty; but what chance have I, when every day, every hour of the day if he likes to put himself to such frequent pain, he may see and bitterly note the contrast between the woman of his choice and the woman of his fate—the woman from whom he is irrevocably parted, and the woman to whom he is as irrevocably joined. And I think that hardly a day passes that he does not give himself the opportunity of instituting the comparison.

Not that he is unkind to me; do not think that. It would be impossible to Roger to be unkind to any thing, much more to any weakly woman thing that is quite in his own power. No, no! there is no fear of that. I have no need to be a grizzle. I have no cross words, no petulances, no neglects even, to bear. But oh! in all his friendly words, in all his kindly, considerate actions, what a chill there is! It is as if some one that had been a day dead laid his hand on my heart!

How many, many miles farther apart we are now, than we were when I was here, and he in Antigua; albeit then the noisy winds roared and sung, and the brown billows tumbled between us! If he would but hit me, or box my ears, as Bobby has so often done—a good swinging, tingling box, that made one see stars, and incarnadized all one side of one's countenance—oh, how much, much less would it hurt than do the frosty chillness of his smiles, the uncaressing touch of his cool hands!

I have plenty of time to think these thoughts, for I am a great deal alone now. Roger is out all day, hunting or with his agent, or on some of the manifold business that landed property entails, or that the settlement of Mr. Huntley's inextricably tangled affairs involves. Very often he does not come in till dressing-time. I never ask him where he has been—never! I think that I know.

Often in these after-days, pondering on those ill times, seeing their incidents in that duer proportion that a stand-point at a little distance from them gives, it has occurred to me that sometimes I was wrong, that not seldom, while I was eating my heart out up-stairs, with dumb jealousy picturing to myself my husband in the shaded fragrance, the dulcet gloom of the drawing-room at Laurel Cottage, he was in the house with me, as much alone as I, in the dull solitude of his own room, pacing up and down the carpet, or bending over an unread book.

I will tell you why I think so. One day—it is the end of March now, the year is no longer a swaddled baby, it is shooting up into a tall stripling—I have been straying about the brown gardens, alone, of course. It is a year to-day since Bobby and I together strolled among the kitchen-stuff in the garden at home, since he served me that ill turn with the ladder. Every thing reminds me of that day: these might be the same crocus-clumps, as those that last year frightened away winter with their purple and gold banners. I remember that, as I looked down their deep throats, I was humming Tou Tou's verb, "J'aime, I love; Tu aimes, Thou lovest; Il aime, He loves."

I sigh. There was the same purple promise over the budded woods; the same sharpness in the bustling wind. Since then, Nature has gone through all her plodding processes, and now it is all to do over again. A sense of fatigue at the infinite repetitions of life comes over me. If Nature would but make a little variation! If the seasons would but change their places a little, and the flowers their order, so that there might be something of unexpectedness about them! But no! they walk round and round forever in their monotonous leisure.

I am stooping to pick a little posy of violets as these languid thoughts dawdle through my mind—blue mysteries of sweetness and color, born of the unscented, dull earth. As I pass Roger's door, having reentered the house, the thought strikes me to set them on his writing-table. Most likely he will not notice them, not be aware of them: but even so they will be able humbly to speak to him the sweet things that he will not listen to from me. I open the door and listlessly enter. If I had thought that there was any chance of his being within, I should not have done so without knocking; indeed, I hardly think I should have done it at all, but this seems to me most unlikely. Nevertheless, he is.

As I enter, I catch sudden sight of him. He is sitting in his arm-chair, his elbows leaned on the table before him, his hand passed through his ruffled hair, and his gray eyes straying abstractedly away from the neglected page before him. I see him before he sees me. I have time to take in all the dejection of his attitude, all its spiritless idleness. At the slight noise my skirts make, he looks up. I stop on the threshold.

"I—I thought you were out," say I, hesitatingly, and reddening a little, as if I were being caught in the commission of some little private sin.

"No, I came in an hour ago."

"I beg your pardon," I say, humbly; "I will not disturb you; I would have knocked if I had known!"

He has risen, and is coming toward me.

"Knock! why, in Heaven's name, should you knock?" he says, with something of his old glad animation; then, suddenly changing his tone to one of courteous friendly coldness, "Why do you stand out there? will not you come in?"

I comply with this invitation, and, entering, sit down in another arm-chair not far from Roger's, but, now that I am here, I do not seem to have much to say.

"You have been in the gardens?" he says, presently, glancing at my little nosegay, and speaking more to hinder total silence from reigning, than for any other reason.

"Yes," I reply, trying to be cheerful and chatty, "I have been picking these; the Czar have not half their perfume, though they are three times their size! these smell so good!"

As I speak, I timidly half stretch out the little bunch to him, that he, too, may inhale their odor, but the gesture is so uncertain and faint that he does not perceive it—at least, he takes no notice of it, and I am sure that if he had he would; but yet I am so discouraged by the failure of my little overture that I have not resolution enough to tell him that I had gathered them for him. Instead, I snubbedly and discomfortedly put them in my own breast.

Presently I speak again.

"Do you remember," I say—"no, I dare say you do not, but yet it is so—it is a year to-day since you found me sitting on the top of the wall!—such a situation for a person of nineteen to be discovered in!"

At the recollection I laugh a little, and not bitterly, which is what I do not often do now. I can only see his profile, but it seems to me that a faint smile is dawning on his face, too.

"It was a good jump, was not it?" I go on, laughing again; "I still wonder that I did not knock you down."

He is certainly smiling now; his face has almost its old, tender mirth.

"It will be a year to-morrow," continue I, emboldened by perceiving this, and beginning to count on my fingers, "since Toothless Jack and the curates came to dine, and you staid so long in the dining-room that I fell asleep; the day after to-morrow, it will be a year since we walked by the river-side, and saw the goslings flowering out on the willows; the day after that it will be a year since—"

"Stop!" he cries, interrupting me, with a voice and face equally full of disquiet and pain; "do not go on, where is the use?—I hate anniversaries."

I stop, quenched into silence; my poor little trickle of talk effectually dried. After a pause, he speaks.

"What has made you think of all these dead trivialities?" he asks in a voice more moved—or I think so—less positively steady than his has been of late; "at your age, it is more natural to look on than to look back."

"Is it?" say I, sadly, "I do not know; I seem to have such a great deal of time for thinking now; this house is so extraordinarily silent! did you never notice it?—of course it is large, and we are only two people in it, but at home it never seemed to me so deadly quiet, even when I was alone in the house."

"Were you ever alone?" he asks, with a smile. He is thinking of the noisy multitude that are connected in his memory with my father's mansion; that, during all his experience of it, have filled its rooms and passages with the hubbub of their strong-lunged jollity.

"Yes, I have been," I reply; "not often, of course! but several times, when the boys were away, and father and mother and Barbara had gone out to dinner; of course it seemed still and dumb, but not—" (shuddering a little)—"not so aggressively loudly silent as this does!"

He looks at me, with a sort of remorseful pain.

"It is very dull for you!" he says, compassionately; "shut up in endless duet, with a person treble your age! I ought to have thought of that; in a month or so, we shall be going to London, that will amuse you, will not it? and till then, is there any one that you would like to have asked here?—any friend of your own?—any companion of your own age?"

"No," reply I, despondently, staring out of the window, "I have no friends."

"The boys, then?" speaking with a sudden assurance of tone, as one that has certainly hit upon a pleasant suggestion.

I shake my head.

"I could not have Bobby and the Brat, if I would, and I would not have Algy if I could!" I reply with curt dejection.

"Barbara, then?"

Again I shake my head. Not even Barbara will I allow to witness the failure of my dreams, the downfall of my high castles, the sterility of my Promised Land.

"No, I will not have Barbara!" I answer; "last time that she was here—" but I cannot finish my sentence. I break away weeping.



CHAPTER XXXIX.

"I think you hardly know the tender rhyme Of 'Trust me not at all or all in all!'"

There are some wounds, O, my friends, that Time, by himself, with no clever physician to help him, will surely cure. You all know that, do not you? some wounds that he will lay his cool ointment on, and by-and-by they are well. Among such, are the departures hence of those we have strongly loved, and to whom we have always been, as much as in us lay, tender and good. But there are others that he only worsens—yawning gaps that he but widens; as if one were to put one's fingers in a great rent, and tear it asunder. And of these last is mine.

As the year grows apace, as the evenings draw themselves out, and the sun every day puts on fresh strength, we seem to grow ever more certainly apart. Our bodies, indeed, are nigh each other, but our souls are sundered. It never seems to strike any one, it is true, that we are not a happy couple; indeed, it would be very absurd if it did. We never wrangle—we never contradict each other—we have no tiffs; but we are two and not one. Whatever may be the cause, whether it be due to his shaken confidence in me, or (I myself assign this latter as its chief reason) to the constant neighborhood of the woman whom I know him to have loved and coveted years before he ever saw me; whatever may be the cause, the fact remains; I no longer please him. It does not surprise me much. After all, the boys always told me that men would not care about me; that I was not the sort of woman to get on with them! Well, perhaps! It certainly seems so.

I meet Mrs. Huntley pretty often in society nowadays, at such staid and sober dinners as the neighborhood thinks fit to indulge in, in this lenten season; and, whenever I do so, I cannot refrain from a stealthy and wistful observation of her.

She is ten—twelve years older than I. Between her and me lie the ten years best worth living of a woman's life; and yet, how easily she distances me! With no straining, with no hard-breathed effort, she canters lightly past me. So I think, as I intently and curiously watch her—watch her graceful, languid silence with women, her pretty, lady-like playfulness with men. And how successful she is with them! how highly they relish her! While I, in the uselessness of my round, white youth, sit benched among the old women, dropping spiritless, pointless "yeses" and "noes" among the veteran worldliness of their talk, how they crowd about her, like swarmed bees on some honeyed, spring day! how they scowl at each other! and finesse as to who shall approach most nearly to her cloudy skirts!

Several times I have strained my ears to catch what are the utterances that make them laugh so much, make them look both so fluttered and so smoothed. Each time that I succeed, I am disappointed. There is no touch of genius, no salt of wit in any thing she says. Her utterances are hardly more brilliant than my own.

You will despise me, I think, friends, when I tell you that in these days I made one or two pitiful little efforts to imitate her, to copy, distantly and humbly indeed, the fashion of her clothes, to learn the trick of her voice, of her slow, soft gait, of her little, surprised laugh. But I soon give it up. If I tried till my death-day, I should never arrive at any thing but a miserable travesty. Before—ere Roger's return—I used complacently to treasure up any little civil speeches, any small compliments that people paid me, thinking, "If such and such a one think me pleasing, why may not Roger?" But now I have given this up, too.

I seem to myself to have grown very dull. I think my wits are not so bright as they used to be. At home, I used to be reckoned one of the pleasantest of us: the boys used to laugh when I said things: but not even the most hysterically mirthful could find food for laughter in my talk now.

And so the days pass; and we go to London. Sometimes I have thought that it will be better when we get there. At least, she will not be there. How can she, with her husband gnashing his teeth in lonely discomfiture at his exasperated creditors, and receiptless bills, in sultry St. Thomas? But, somehow, she is. What good Samaritan takes out his twopence and pays for her little apartment, for her stacks of cut flowers, for her brougham and her opera-boxes, is no concern of mine. But, somehow, there always are good Samaritans in those cases; and, let alone Samaritans, there are no priests or Levites stonyhearted enough to pass by these dear, little, lovely things on the other side.

We go out a good deal, Roger and I, and everywhere he accompanies me. It bores him infinitely, though he does not say so. One night, we are at the play. It is the Prince of Wales's, the one theatre where one may enjoy a pleasant certainty of being rationally amused, of being free from the otherwise universal dominion of Limelight and Legs. The little house is very full; it always is. Some of the royalties are here, laughing "a gorge deployee!" I have been laughing, too; laughing in my old fashion; not in Mrs. Zephine's little rippling way, but with the thorough-paced, unconventional violence with which I used to reward the homely sallies of Bobby and the Brat. I am laughing still, though the curtain has fallen between the acts, and the orchestra are fiddling gayly away, and the turned-up gas making everybody look pale. My opera-glasses are in my hand, and I am turning them slowly round the house, making out acquaintances in the stalls, prying into the secrets of the boxes, examining the well-known features of my future king.