Sydney."

She hoped that he would tell her what was wrong. To her disappointment,
he smiled, and answered lightly.

"I'm all right, Nan. I have a good deal to do just now, and am rather
tired--that is all."

"Tired--and anxious?" she said, looking at him with more keenness than
he had thought her soft eyes capable of expressing.

"Anxious! no, I have not much to be anxious about, have I?"

He spoke with a laugh; but, to her fancy, there was something
half-alarmed and half-defiant in the pose of his lifted head, the glance
of his handsome bright eyes. Her heart sank a little: it seemed to her
that it would have been nobler in her husband to tell her the whole
truth, and it had never occurred to her before to think of him as
ignoble in any way.

"I suppose you do not want to tell me for fear of troubling me," she
said, with a tremor in her voice; "but I think I know what you are
anxious about, Sydney."

He gave a little start as he turned towards her.

"Some man has been here whilst you were out, and he sent up this letter
with a request that it should be opened. Look!" she said, giving him the
bill, "you can tear it up now. I was sure you had gone out to see about
it, but I thought it better that I should settle it at once. I
hope"--with a little girlish nervousness--"you don't mind?"

He had sat down on a chair when she showed him Mr. Copley's letter, with
the look of a man determined to bear a blow, but he sprang up again at
the sight of his dishonored acceptance.

"And you have paid it, Nan?" he cried.

"Yes, I paid it. Oh, Sydney, it was a little thing to do! If only you
had told me months ago!"

Her eyes brimmed over with tears at last. She had been smarting under a
sense of terrible humiliation ever since Mr. Copley's visit, but
hitherto she had not wept. Now, when her husband took her in his arms
and looked into her eyes, the pain at her heart was somewhat assuaged,
although the tears fell swiftly down her pale cheeks.

"Nan, I never dreamed that I should find your kindness so bitter to me,"
Sydney said.

He was profoundly moved by her gentleness and by her generosity alike.
But inasmuch as it requires more generosity of nature to accept a gift
nobly than to make it, he felt himself shamed in her eyes, and his wife
was in her turn pained by the consciousness of his shame.

"Why should you be afraid to trust me?" she said. "All that concerns you
concerns me as well; and I am only setting myself