miled, but was not satisfied.

'The only married people,' Tarrant pursued, 'who can live together with
impunity, are those who are rich enough, and sensible enough, to have
two distinct establishments under the same roof. The ordinary eight or
ten-roomed house, inhabited by decent middle-class folk, is a gruesome
sight. What a huddlement of male and female! They are factories of
quarrel and hate--those respectable, brass-curtain-rodded sties--they
are full of things that won't bear mentioning. If our income never rises
above that, we shall live to the end of our days as we do now.'

Nancy looked appalled.

'But how can you hope to make thousands a year?'

'I have no such hope; hundreds would be sufficient. I don't aim at a
house in London; everything there is intolerable, except the fine old
houses which have a history, and which I could never afford. For
my home, I want to find some rambling old place among hills and
woods,--some house where generations have lived and died,--where my boy,
as he grows up, may learn to love the old and beautiful things about
him. I myself never had a home; most London children don't know what is
meant by home; their houses are only more or less comfortable lodgings,
perpetual change within and without.'

'Your thoughts are wonderfully like my father's, sometimes,' said Nancy.

'From what you have told me of him, I think we should have agreed in a
good many things.'

'And how unfortunate we were! If he had recovered from that illness,--if
he had lived only a few months,--everything would have been made easy.'

'For me altogether too easy,' Tarrant observed.

'It has been a good thing for you to have to work,' Nancy assented. 'I
understand the change for the better in you. But'--she smiled--'you have
more self-will than you used to have.'

'That's just where I have gained.--But don't think that I find it easy
or pleasant to resist your wish. I couldn't do it if I were not so sure
that I am acting for your advantage as well as my own. A man who finds
himself married to a fool, is a fool himself if he doesn't take his own
course regardless of his wife. But I am in a very different position;
I love you more and more, Nancy, because I am learning more and more to
respect you; I think of your happiness most assuredly as much as I think
of my own. But even if my own good weighed as nothing against yours, I
should be wise to resist you just as I do now. Hugger-mugger marriage is
a defi