thetic mantel, but he
supposed now he never should. He said it was all very different from
that tunnel, the old Albany depot, where they had waited the morning
they went to New York when they were starting on their wedding journey.

"The morning, Basil!" cried his wife. "We went at night; and we were
going to take the boat, but it stormed so!" She gave him a glance of
such reproach that he could not answer anything, and now she asked him
whether he supposed their cook and second girl would be contented with
one of those dark holes where they put girls to sleep in New York flats,
and what she should do if Margaret, especially, left her. He ventured
to suggest that Margaret would probably like the city; but, if she left,
there were plenty of other girls to be had in New York. She replied that
there were none she could trust, and that she knew Margaret would not
stay. He asked her why she took her, then--why she did not give her up
at once; and she answered that it would be inhuman to give her up just
in the edge of the winter. She had promised to keep her; and Margaret
was pleased with the notion of going to New York, where she had a
cousin.

"Then perhaps she'll be pleased with the notion of staying," he said.

"Oh, much you know about it!" she retorted; and, in view of the
hypothetical difficulty and his want of sympathy, she fell into a gloom,
from which she roused herself at last by declaring that, if there was
nothing else in the flat they took, there should be a light kitchen and
a bright, sunny bedroom for Margaret. He expressed the belief that
they could easily find such a flat as that, and she denounced his fatal
optimism, which buoyed him up in the absence of an undertaking and let
him drop into the depths of despair in its presence.

He owned this defect of temperament, but he said that it compensated the
opposite in her character. "I suppose that's one of the chief uses of
marriage; people supplement one another, and form a pretty fair sort of
human being together. The only drawback to the theory is that unmarried
people seem each as complete and whole as a married pair."

She refused to be amused; she turned her face to the window and put her
handkerchief up under her veil.

It was not till the dining-car was attached to their train that they
were both able to escape for an hour into the care-free mood of their
earlier travels, when they were so easily taken out of themselves.
The time had been when the