ould have Miss
Winn, and a housekeeper, and a man----"

"It's a lonely life for a woman."

"But why not for a man?"

"Oh, well, that is different. Only a few men do. And they grow queer and
opinionated."

A fortnight ago she would have protested and said, "You are not old, you
are not opinionated," in her eager, girlish manner. Now she was hurt,
and she could not tell why; so she kept silent.

And she began to note a change in him. The delightful harmony in which
they had lived fell below the major key into minors, that touched and
pierced her. He did not come so often to listen to her music, to ask her
for a song, to watch while she painted some pretty flower, to go around
with her training roses, or cutting them for the house. She put a few of
them everywhere; she did not like great bunches, only such things as
grew in clusters, lilacs and syringas and long sprays of clematis. She
missed the little walks around, and the dear talks they used to have.

She felt somewhat deceitful in planning adroitly. She made Miss Winn go
to church with her, and when they came home with Mr. Saltonstall they
sat on the porch together. A girl thinking of a lover would have asked
him in. Then she went down to Boston, and Anthony came over as often as
he could. Surely there was no danger with him.

All this time Chilian Leverett was having a hard fight with himself. He
was really ashamed of having been conquered by what he called a boy's
romantic passion. He could excuse himself for the early lapse; he was a
boy then. His honor and what he called good sense were mightily at war
with this desire that well-nigh overmastered him. True, men older than
he had married young wives. But this child had been entrusted to him in
a sacred fashion by her dying father; he must place before her the best
and richest of life, even if it condemned him to after-years of joyless
solitude.

For it was not as a father he loved her, though he had played a little
at fatherhood in the beginning. She was so companionable, they had so
many similar tastes. He was so fond of reading to an appreciative
listener, and even as he sat in the darkness, when she did not know he
was alone in the study, he could see her lovely eyes raised in their
tender light. He thought this her unusual wisdom and discernment, never
dreaming it had been mostly his training and her receptiveness. And to
think of the house without her! Why, going out of it in her wedding gown
would b