t lesson in household responsibilities.

From this important business, Mr. Harper was laughingly excluded, as
being only a "gentleman," and required merely to pronounce a final
decision upon the niceties of feminine choice.

"In fact," said Emma, gaily assuming the autocracy of her sex, "husbands
ought to have nothing at all to do with house-choosing or house-keeping,
except to pay the rent and the bills."

Agatha could not help laughing at this, until she saw that Mr. Harper
was silent.

A few minutes before they started he took his wife aside, and showed her
a letter. It was the formal renunciation of the appointment he held at
Montreal.

"How kind!" she cried in unfeigned delight. "And how quickly you have
fulfilled your promise!"

"When I have once decided I always like to do the thing immediately.
This letter shall go to-day."

"Ah!--let me post it," whispered Agatha, taking a wilful, childish
pleasure in thus demolishing every chance of the future she had so
dreaded.

"What! cannot you yet trust me?" returned her husband. "Nay, there is no
fear. What is done is done. But you shall have your way."

And walking with them a little distance, he suffered Agatha with her own
hands to post the decisive letter.

After he left them, she told Mrs. Thornycroft the welcome news,
enlarging upon Mr. Harper's goodness in resigning so much for her sake.

"Resigning?" said Emma, laughing. "Well, I don't see much noble
resignation in a young man's giving up a hardworking situation in the
colonies to live at ease on his wife's property in England. My dear,
husbands always like to make the most of their little sacrifices. You
mustn't believe half they say."

"My husband never said one word of his," cried Agatha, rather
indignantly, and repented herself of her frankness to one whose
ideas now more than ever jarred with her own. Three weeks' constant
association with a man like Nathanael had lifted her mind above the
ordinary standard of womanhood to which Emma belonged. She began to half
believe the truth of what she had once with great astonishment heard
Anne Valery declare--ay, even Anne Valery--that if the noblest moral
type of man and of woman were each placed side by side, the man would be
the greater of the two.

But this thought she kept fondly to herself, and suffered Emma to talk
on without much attending to her conversation. It was chiefly about
some City business with which "her James" had been greatly anno