immoral in tone to one man and
visits another for weeks in an ale-house--but," and here he broke off
suddenly, "you may know no better with your rearing."

"Miss Erskine will perhaps have been telling you what it is customary
for young ladies to do," Nancy suggested, in a dangerous, level voice.

"I do not need telling. It's a thing about which right-thinking people
will agree without words," he answered; and it was here that Nancy
spoke in her own voice, though heated by anger, and with the words
coming faster than ordinary.

"And that's maybe true," she said; "but there are other things to be
considered. It has always been in my mind that most marriages are very
badly made up," she said. "That in this greatest of all affairs between
a man and a woman people lose their wits and trust to a blind kind of
attraction for each other. I have thought to use my head a bit more in
the matter. The very fact that you are misunderstanding me now as you
do goes far to prove how foolish a marriage between us would have
been."

"Heavens!" he cried, "you talk of marriage as though it were a contract
between two shop-keepers to be argle-bargled over. It's an affair of
the heart, not of the head. Ye've never loved me," he said bitterly,
"or ye'd know that."

"That may be true," Nancy answered, mutinously. "I have tried to be
fair to you, however, and not to let you have a wife who didn't know
her own mind. I am, as you reminded me, different from other women in
many ways. I like many----"

"I've noted that," he interrupted with scant courtesy.

"And I'm afraid I shall continue to like them for one thing or another
till the end; and you're of a jealous turn, Danvers," she said, coldly.

"I have been," he said. "Where you were concerned I haven't a generous
thought. I take shares in my wife with no man. I have been jealous of
the sound of your voice, the glance of your eye. What I have had to
endure because of this ye must surely have seen! When a woman loves a
man she has no thought for another----"

"It's may be so," Nancy broke in, "but it's as entirely beyond me as
flying. If I loved you with all there is of me, and another came by
with a bit of a rhyme, or a new tale, or a plan quite of his own
thinking, the chances are many that you'd be clear out of my mind while
he stayed."

"'Tis fortunate, as you say," he interrupted, "that we discover this
before 'tis too late. I think it's a peculiarity that will go far to
making