hing his worst enemy could
accuse him of! why, he was obliged to run the constable two years ago."

"But I suppose," say I, slowly, "that he was better off--_well_ off
once--when she married him, for instance?"

"How did you know that?" he asks, a little surprised. "Who told you?
Yes; at that time he was looked upon as quite a _parti_."

"Better off than _you_, I suppose?" say I, still speaking slowly, and
reading the carpet. "I mean than you were then?"

Again he laughs.

"He might easily have been that? I had nothing but my younger son's
portion and my pay; why, Nancy, I had an idea that I had told you that
before."

"I dare say you did," reply I, readily, "but I like to hear it again."

Yet another pause.

"He is badly off _now_, then," say I, presently, with a faintly
triumphant accent.

"About as badly off as it is possible to be," answers Roger, very
gravely; "that is my business with his wife; she and I are trying to
make an arrangement with his creditors, to enable him to come home."

"To come home!" echo I, raising my eyebrows in an artless astonishment;
"but if he _does_ come home, what will become of Algy and the _rest of
them_?"

"The rest of _whom_?" asks Roger, but there is such a severity in his
eye as he puts the question that it is not too much to say I _dare not_
explain. The one thing hated of Roger's soul--the one thing for which he
has no tolerance, and on which he brings to bear all the weight of his
righteous wrath, is _scandal_. Not even me will he allow to nibble at a
neighbor's fame.

"Is she much changed since you saw her last?" pursue I presently, with
infantile guilelessness; "was her hair _red_ then? some people say it
_used_ to be black!"

I raise my eyes to his face as I put this gentle query, in order the
better to trace its effect; but the concern that I see in his
countenance is so very much greater than any that I had intended to have
summoned that I have no sooner hurled my dart than I repent me of having
done it.

"Nancy!" he says, putting one hand under my chin, and stroking my hair
with the other--"am I going to have a _backbiting_ wife? Child! child!
there was neither hatred nor malice in the little girl I found sitting
at the top of the wall."

I do not answer.

"Nancy," he says again, in a voice of most thorough earnestness, "I have
a favor to ask of you--I know when I put it _that way_, that you will
not say 'No;' if you do not mind, I had rather you did