s, of course."

"I have nothing to reproach her with. I expected to find her temper
hasty, but it was not so--her behavior was unexceptionable. So was mine.
Our bliss was perfect, but unfortunately, I was not made for domestic
bliss--at all events I could not endure it--so I fled, and when she
caught me again I could give no excuse for my flight, though I made it
clear to her that I would not resume our connubial relations just yet.
We parted on bad terms. I fully intended to write her a sweet letter
to make her forgive me in spite of herself, but somehow the weeks have
slipped away and I am still fully intending. She has never written, and
I have never written. This is a pretty state of things, isn't it, Miss
Wilson, after all her advantages under the influence of moral force and
the movement for the higher education of women?"

"By your own admission, the fault seems to lie upon your moral training
and not upon hers."

"The fault was in the conditions of our association. Why they should
have attracted me so strongly at first, and repelled me so horribly
afterwards, is one of those devil's riddles which will not be answered
until we shall have traced all the yet unsuspected reactions of our
inveterate dishonesty. But I am wasting your time, I fear. You sent
for Smilash, and I have responded by practically annihilating him. In
public, however, you must still bear with his antics. One moment more.
I had forgotten to ask you whether you are interested in the shepherd
whose wife you sheltered on the night of the storm?"

"He assured me, before he took his wife away, that he was comfortably
settled in a lodging in Lyvern."

"Yes. Very comfortably settled indeed. For half-a-crown a week he
obtained permission to share a spacious drawing-room with two other
families in a ten-roomed house in not much better repair than his
blown-down hovel. This house yields to its landlord over two hundred
a year, or rather more than the rent of a commodious mansion in South
Kensington. It is a troublesome rent to collect, but on the other
hand there is no expenditure for repairs or sanitation, which are not
considered necessary in tenement houses. Our friend has to walk three
miles to his work and three miles back. Exercise is a capital thing for
a student or a city clerk, but to a shepherd who has been in the fields
all day, a long walk at the end of his work is somewhat too much of a
good thing. He begged for an increase of wages to c