believed this to be the case, I'd go away
tomorrow, though I don't know well where to, or what for, but it is hard
to understand, since I always thought that Dolly liked me, as certainly
I ever did, and still do, _her_.

"Try and clear up this for me in your next. I suppose it was by way of
what is called 'sparing me,' you said nothing of the Lyles in your
last, but I saw in the 'Morning Post' all about the departure for the
Continent, intending to reside some years in Italy.

"And that is more than I 'd do if I owned Lyle Abbey, and had
eighteen blood-horses in my stable, and a clipper cutter in the Bay of
Curryglass. I suppose the truth is, people never do know when they're
well off."

The moral reflection, not arrived at so easily or so rapidly as the
reader can imagine, concluded Tony's letter, to which in due time came
a long answer from his mother. With the home gossip we shall not
burden the reader, nor shall we ask of him to go through the short
summary--four close pages--of the doctor's discourses on the text, "I
would ye were hot or cold," two sensations that certainly the mere sight
of the exposition occasioned to Tony. We limit ourselves to the words of
the postscript.

"I cannot understand Dolly at all, and I am afraid to mislead you as to
what you ask. My impression is--but mind, it is mere impression--she has
grown somewhat out of her old friendship for you. Some stories possibly
have represented you in a wrong light, and I half think you may be
right, and that she would be less averse to the marriage if she knew you
were not to be in the house with them. It was, indeed, only this morning
the doctor said, 'Young married folk should aye learn each other's
failings without bystanders to observe them,'--a significant hint I
thought I would write to you by this post."

When Tony received his epistle, he was seated in his own room, leisurely
engaged in deciphering a paragraph in an Italian newspaper, descriptive
of Garibaldi's departure from a little bay near Genoa to his Sicilian
expedition.

Nothing short of a letter from his mother could have withdrawn his
attention from a description so full of intense interest to him; and
partly, indeed, from this cause, and partly from the hard labor of
rendering the foreign language, the details stuck in his mind during all
the time he was reading his mother's words.

"So that 's the secret, is it?" muttered he. "Dolly wishes to be alone
with her husband,--nat