cry out, but she clasped her little hands, and said
piteously, "Oh, Hugh, do not be angry with me. I tried so hard to be
lost," and then stood and shivered in the long grass.

"You tried so hard to be lost," he said, in a choked voice. "Child,
child, do you know what you have done; you have nearly broken my heart
as well as your own. I have been very angry, Fay, but I have forgotten
it now; but you must come back to me, darling, for I can not live
without my Wee Wifie any more;" and as she hid her face in her
trembling hands, not daring to look at him, he suddenly lifted the
little creature in his arms; and as Fay felt herself drawn to his
breast, she knew that she was no longer an unloved wife.

* * * * *

She was calmer now. At his words and touch she had broken into an
agony of weeping that had terrified him; but he had soothed her with
fond words and kisses, and presently she was sitting beside him with
her shy, sweet face radiant with happiness, and her hands clasped
firmly in his. He had been telling her about his accident, and his sad
solitary winter, and of the heart-sickness that he had suffered.

"Oh, my darling, will you ever forgive me?" she whispered. "It was for
your sake I went. How could I know that you would miss me so--that you
really wanted me? it nearly killed me to leave you; and I do not think
I should have lived long if you had not found me."

"My child," he said, very gravely and gently, "we have both done
wrong, and must forgive each other; but my sin is the heavier. I was
older and I knew the world, and I ought to have remembered that my
child-wife did not know it too. If you had not been so young you would
never have left me, but now my Wee Wifie will never desert me again."

"No, never. Oh," pressing nearer to him with a shudder, "to think how
you have suffered. I could not have borne it if I had known."

"Yes," he said, lightly, for her great, beautiful eyes were wide with
trouble at the recollection, and he wanted to see her smile, "it has
changed me into a middle-aged man. Look how my hair has worn off my
forehead, and there are actually gray hairs in my beard. People will
say we look like father and daughter when they see us together."

"Oh," she returned, shyly, for it was not quite easy to look at
him--Hugh was so different somehow--"I shall not mind what people say.
Now I have my own husband back, it will not matter a bit to me how
gray and old y