"My wife?" He laughed triumphantly, and silenced her by manly
smothering.

Her scruple was perhaps an honourable one, he said. Perhaps the jewels
were safer in their iron box. He had merely intended a surprise and
gratification to her.

Courage was coming to enable her to speak more plainly, when his
discontinuing to insist on her wearing the jewels, under an appearance
of deference of her wishes, disarmed her by touching her sympathies.

She said, however, "I fear we do not often agree, Willoughby."

"When you are a little older!" was the irritating answer.

"It would then be too late to make the discovery."

"The discovery, I apprehend, is not imperative, my love."

"It seems to me that our minds are opposed."

"I should," said he, "have been awake to it at a single indication, be
sure."

"But I know," she pursued, "I have learned that the ideal of conduct
for women is to subject their minds to the part of an accompaniment."

"For women, my love? my wife will be in natural harmony with me."

"Ah!" She compressed her lips. The yawn would come. "I am sleepier here
than anywhere."

"Ours, my Clara, is the finest air of the kingdom. It has the effect of
sea-air."

"But if I am always asleep here?"

"We shall have to make a public exhibition of the Beauty."

This dash of his liveliness defeated her.

She left him, feeling the contempt of the brain feverishly quickened
and fine-pointed, for the brain chewing the cud in the happy pastures
of unawakedness. So violent was the fever, so keen her introspection,
that she spared few, and Vernon was not among them. Young Crossjay,
whom she considered the least able of all to act as an ally, was the
only one she courted with a real desire to please him, he was the one
she affectionately envied; he was the youngest, the freest, he had the
world before him, and he did not know how horrible the world was, or
could be made to look. She loved the boy from expecting nothing of him.
Others, Vernon Whitford, for instance, could help, and moved no hand.
He read her case. A scrutiny so penetrating under its air of abstract
thoughtfulness, though his eyes did but rest on her a second or two,
signified that he read her line by line, and to the end--excepting
what she thought of him for probing her with that sharp steel of
insight without a purpose.

She knew her mind's injustice. It was her case, her lamentable
case--the impatient panic-stricken nerves of a captured wil