ind moonlight reveries of her early maidenhood. She remembered how
she used, before she ever had a lover, to lie awake and dream of one.
Then she fell to planning how, in the event of Randolph's marrying,
the front chamber could be refurnished, and the furniture in that
room put in the northwest chamber, which was sparsely furnished and
little used except for storage purposes. Then the northwest room
could be the guest-chamber, and Randolph's present room would answer
very well for his books, and would be a study when the bed was taken
down.

She had the front chamber completely refurnished when she fell
asleep, and besides had some exciting and entirely victorious
feminine tilts with sundry women friends who had ventured to intimate
that her son had made an odd matrimonial choice. It was quite a cold
night, and she wondered if that child had sufficient clothing on her
bed. She was in reality, in her own way, as much in love with the
girl as her son.

Chapter XXXVI

Carroll, in the ensuing weeks, living alone with Charlotte, endured
a species of mental and spiritual torture which might have been
compared with the rack and wheel of the Inquisition. It seemed
to Arthur Carroll in those days as if torture was as truly one
of the elements incumbent upon man's existence as fire, water,
or air. He got an uncanny fancy that if it ceased he would cease.
He had all his life, except in violent stresses, that happy,
contented-with-the-sweet-of-the-moment temperament popularly supposed
to be a characteristic of the butterfly over the rose. But deprive
the butterfly of the rose and he might easily become a more tragic
thing than any in existence. Now Carroll was deprived of his rose, he
could get absolutely none of the sweets out of existence from whence
his own individuality manufactured its honey. Even Charlotte's
presence became an additional torment to him, dearly as he loved her
and as thoroughly as he realized what her coming back had done for
him, from what it had saved him. She had given him the impetus which
placed him back in his normal condition, but, back there, he suffered
even more, as a man will suffer less under a surgical operation
than when the influence of the anesthetics has ceased. There was
absolutely no ready money in the house during those weeks except the
sum which Charlotte's aunt had sent her, which was fast diminishing,
and a few scattering dollars, or rather, pennies, which Carroll
picked up i