else. I should think, at least, you might have contrived
to settle this place on me and poor little Lillie, that we might have
a house to put our heads in."

"Lillie, Lillie," said John, "this is too much! Don't you think that
_I_ suffer at all?"

"I don't see that you do," said Lillie, sobbing. "I dare say you are
glad of it; it is just like you. Oh, dear, I wish I had never been
married!"

"I _certainly_ do," said John, fervently.

"I suppose so. You see, it is nothing to you men; you don't care any
thing about these things. If you can get a musty old corner and your
books, you are perfectly satisfied; and you don't know when things are
pretty, and when they are not: and so you can talk grand about your
honor and your conscience and all that. I suppose the carriages and
horses have got to be sold too?"

"Certainly, Lillie," said John, hardening his heart and his tone.

"Well, well," she said, "I wish you would go now and send ma to me.
I don't want to talk about it any more. My head aches as if it would
split. Poor ma! She little thought when I married you that it was
going to come to this."

John walked out of the room gloomily enough. He had received this
morning his _check-mate_. All illusion was at an end. The woman that
he had loved and idolized and caressed and petted and indulged, in
whom he had been daily and hourly disappointed since he was married,
but of whom he still hoped and hoped, he now felt was of a nature not
only unlike, but opposed to his own. He felt that he could neither
love nor respect her further. And yet she was his wife, and the mother
of his daughter, and the only queen of his household; and he had
solemnly promised at God's altar that "forsaking all others, he would
keep only unto her, so long as they both should live, for better, for
worse," John muttered to himself,--"for better, for worse. This is the
worse; and oh, it is dreadful!"

In all John's hours of sorrow and trouble, the instinctive feeling of
his heart was to go back to the memory of his mother; and the nearest
to his mother was his sister Grace. In this hour of his blind sorrow,
he walked directly over to the little cottage on Elm Street, which
Grace and her husband had made a perfectly ideal home.

When he came into the parlor, Grace and Rose were sitting together
with an open letter lying between them. It was evident that some
crisis of tender confidence had passed between them; for the tears
were hardly dry on