ntains. And
you bartered it because of a clerkship or a lying maxim or perhaps a
finger-ring.' I suppose that they must laugh a great deal."

"Eh, what? But then you never married?" For masculinity in argument
starts with the word it has found distasteful.

"Why, no."

"Nor I." And his tone implied that the two facts conjoined proved much.

"Miss Willoughby----?" she inquired.

Now, how in heaven's name, could a cloistered Fairhaven have surmised
his intention of proposing on the first convenient opportunity to
handsome, well-to-do Anne Willoughby? He shrugged his wonder off.
"Oh, people will talk, you know. Let any man once find a woman has a
tongue in her head, and the stage-direction is always 'Enter Rumor,
painted full of tongues.'"

Pauline did not appear to have remarked his protest. "Yes,--in the end
you will marry her. And her money will help, just as you have
contrived to make everything else help, toward making John Charteris
comfortable. She is not very clever, but she will always worship you,
and so you two will not prove uncongenial. That is your real tragedy,
if I could make you comprehend."

"So I am going to develop into a pig," he said, with relish,--"a
lovable, contented, unambitious porcine, who is alike indifferent to
the Tariff, the importance of Equal Suffrage and the market-price of
hams, for all that he really cares about is to have his sty as
comfortable as may be possible. That is exactly what I am going to
develop into,--now, isn't it?" And John Charteris, sitting, as was his
habitual fashion, with one foot tucked under him, laughed cheerily.
Oh, just to be alive (he thought) was ample cause for rejoicing! and
how deliciously her eyes, alert with slumbering fires, were peering
through the moon-made shadows of her brows!

"Well----! something of the sort." Pauline was smiling, but
restrainedly, and much as a woman does in condoning the naughtiness of
her child. "And, oh, if only----"

"Why, precisely. 'If only!' quotha. Why, there you word the key-note,
you touch the cornerstone, you ruthlessly illuminate the mainspring, of
an intractable unfeeling universe. For instance, if only

You were the Empress of Ayre and Skye,
And I were Ahkond of Kong,
We could dine every day on apple-pie,
And peddle potatoes, and sleep in a sty,
And people would say when we came to die,
'They _never_ did anything wrong.'

But, as it is, our epitaphs will probably be no