ir money, as
if they had done a fine thing in getting hold of it, and the wife had
been but keeping it from its rightful owner. They do not know what a
confession their whole bearing is, that, but for their wives' money,
they would be but the merest, poorest nobodies. So small are they that
even that suffices to make them feel big! But Helen did not like it,
especially when he would ask her if he might have this or that, or do so
and so. Any common man who heard him would have thought him afraid of
his wife; but a large-hearted woman would at once have understood, as
did Helen, that it all came of his fine sense of truth, and reality, and
obligation. Still Helen would have had him forget all such matters in
connection with her. They were one beyond obligation. She had given him
herself, and what were bank-notes after that? But he thought of her
always as an angel who had taken him in, to comfort, and bless, and
cherish him with love, that he might the better do the work of his God
and hers; therefore his obligation to her was his glory.

"Your ponies go splendidly to-day, Helen," he said, as admiringly he
watched how her hands on the reins seemed to mold their movements.

They were the tiniest, daintiest things, of the smallest ever seen in
harness, but with all the ways of big horses, therefore amusing in their
very grace. They were the delight of the children of Glaston and the
villages round.

"Why _will_ you call them _my_ ponies, Thomas?" returned his wife, just
sufficiently vexed to find it easy to pretend to be cross. "I don't see
what good I have got by marrying you, if every thing is to be mine all
the same!"

"Don't be unreasonable, my Helen!" said the curate, looking into the
lovely eyes whose colors seemed a little blown about in their rings.
"Don't you see it is my way of feeling to myself how much, and with what
a halo about them, they are mine? If I had bought them with my own
money, I should hardly care for them. Thank God, they are _not_ mine
that way, or in any way like that way. _You_ are mine, my life, and they
are yours--mine therefore because they are about you like your clothes
or your watch. They are mine as your handkerchief and your gloves are
mine--through worshiping love. Listen to reason. If a thing is yours it
is ten times more mine than if I had bought it, for, just because it is
yours, I am able to possess it as the meek, and not the land-owners,
inherit the earth. It makes _having_ s