hink about it, and there did seem to be reason. My grandfather had had
this disease, and had died of it. To be sure, he was very old; but that
did not matter: he died of it, all the same. It never troubled my
father, but this made no difference, so far as I was concerned, for I
have always heard that hereditary diseases are apt to skip a generation,
and if this one had skipped, there was nobody for it to skip to but me;
for I have no brothers or sisters.

"The more I thought on this subject, the more troubled my mind became,
and at last I believed it to be my duty to speak to Bernard, although I
did not tell him all my thoughts; for I had had a good many that were
not necessarily connected with hereditary diseases. I was positively
amazed at the way my husband received what I told him. I had expected
that perhaps he might pooh-pooh the whole thing, but he did nothing of
the kind. He became very serious, and talked to me in the most earnest
way.

"'Now, Rosa,' said he, 'I am glad you told me about this, and I want to
impress it upon your mind that you must be very careful. In the first
place, you must totally give up hot spirits and water. You must not
drink more than two glasses of wine, or three at the utmost, at any of
your meals. When you get up in the morning you must totally abstain from
drinking those mixtures that are taken by some people to give appetite
for breakfast. At night you must try to do without any sort of punch or
toddy to make you sleep. If you will take this advice, and restrict
yourself to water and milk, and not over-rich food, I think you may
reasonably expect to live longer than your grandfather did, although I
cannot imagine why any one should want to live that long.'

"Of course I was angry at all this, for I saw then that he was making
fun of me; and I said no more to him, for he was not in the right frame
of mind to listen to me. But I did not stop thinking.

"I now became very intimate with Miss Temple. I began to like her very
much, and I think she liked me. I continued to study her, and I became
convinced that she was a woman to whom a very fastidious man might be
attracted--I do not mean that he would fall in love with her, but that
he would be perfectly satisfied with her. In fact, I summed up her
character by assuring myself that in every way she was perfectly
satisfactory. I have known other women who were more charming, but they
all had faults; and I do not see how any one could h