r he might some day attain
to promote peace and avert rash legislation.

Never once did he allow an inadvertent word to slip from his pen,
whereby she could suspect that she, as his wife, might be a cause of
embarrassment to him, or a clog in the wheel of the chariot which from
now on was to bear him triumphantly among his social friends or
political enemies. Never would he disturb the sweet serenity that
encompassed her. Yet well he knew what an incongruity she would appear
should he present her now--as she had stood by her loom, or in the
ploughed field at his side--to the company he would find in his mother's
home.

Simple and direct as she was, she would walk over their conventions and
proprieties, and never know it. How strange many of those customs of
theirs would appear to her, and how unnecessary! He feared for her most
in her utter ignorance of everything pertaining to the daily existence
of the over-civilized circle to which the changed conditions of his life
would bring her.

Much, he knew, would pass unseen by her, but soon she would begin to
understand, and to wince under their exclamations of "How
extraordinary!" The masklike expression would steal over her face, her
pride would encase her spirit in the deep reserve he himself had found
so hard to penetrate, and he could see her withdrawing more and more
from all, until at last-- Ah! it must not be. He must manage very
carefully, lest Doctor Hoyle's prophecy indeed be fulfilled.

At last the lifting of the veil to the eastward revealed the bold
promontory of Land's End, and soon, beyond, the fair green slopes of his
own beautiful Old England. For all of the captious criticism he had
fallen in the way of bestowing upon her, how he loved her! He felt as if
he must throw up his arms and shout for joy. Suddenly she had become
his, with a sense of possession new to him, and sweet to feel. The
orderliness and stereotyped lines of her social system against which he
had rebelled, and the iron bars of her customs which his soul had
abhorred in the past,--against which his spirit had bruised and beaten
itself,--now lured him on as a security for things stable and fine. In
subtile ways as yet unrealized, he was being drawn back into the cage
from which he had fled for freedom and life.

How quickly he had become accustomed to the air of deference in Mr.
Stretton's continual use of his newly acquired title--"my lord." Why
not? It was his right. The same laws whi