nds which unite the elderly, who have lived together once and so
must live for ever. Slight they may be, but vivid and genuine, merely
because the power to break them is within the grasp of each, and there
is no reason for continuance except a true desire that continue they
shall. When two people have been married for years they seem to become
unconscious of each other's bodily presence so that they move as if
alone, speak aloud things which they do not expect to be answered, and
in general seem to experience all the comfort of solitude without its
loneliness. The joint lives of Ridley and Helen had arrived at this
stage of community, and it was often necessary for one or the other to
recall with an effort whether a thing had been said or only thought,
shared or dreamt in private. At four o'clock in the afternoon two or
three days later Mrs. Ambrose was standing brushing her hair, while
her husband was in the dressing-room which opened out of her room, and
occasionally, through the cascade of water--he was washing his face--she
caught exclamations, "So it goes on year after year; I wish, I wish, I
wish I could make an end of it," to which she paid no attention.

"It's white? Or only brown?" Thus she herself murmured, examining a hair
which gleamed suspiciously among the brown. She pulled it out and laid
it on the dressing-table. She was criticising her own appearance, or
rather approving of it, standing a little way back from the glass and
looking at her own face with superb pride and melancholy, when her
husband appeared in the doorway in his shirt sleeves, his face half
obscured by a towel.

"You often tell me I don't notice things," he remarked.

"Tell me if this is a white hair, then?" she replied. She laid the hair
on his hand.

"There's not a white hair on your head," he exclaimed.

"Ah, Ridley, I begin to doubt," she sighed; and bowed her head under
his eyes so that he might judge, but the inspection produced only a kiss
where the line of parting ran, and husband and wife then proceeded to
move about the room, casually murmuring.

"What was that you were saying?" Helen remarked, after an interval of
conversation which no third person could have understood.

"Rachel--you ought to keep an eye upon Rachel," he observed
significantly, and Helen, though she went on brushing her hair, looked
at him. His observations were apt to be true.

"Young gentlemen don't interest themselves in young women's education
wit