rd indeed for a woman who loves a man with her
whole heart and soul--and he her husband--to go on meeting him day
after day, yet act as if she were his mere business partner. But I
can't help myself; my very nature, as well as a sense of his rights,
prevents me from asking more or even showing that I wish for more.
That WOULD be asking for it. But can it be true that he is positively
learning to dislike me? To shrink from me with that strong repulsion
which women feel toward some men? Oh! If that is true, the case is
hopeless; it would kill me. Every effort to win him, even the most
delicate and unobtrusive, would only drive him farther away; the
deepest instincts of his soul would lead him to withdraw--to shun me.
If this is true, the time may come when, so far from my filling his
house with comfort, I shall make him dread to enter it. Oh, oh! My
only course is to remember just what I promised and he expected when he
married me, and live up to that."

Thus husband and wife reached the same, conclusion and were rendered
equally unhappy.

Chapter XXX.

Holcroft's Best Hope

When Holcroft came in to dinner that day the view he had adopted was
confirmed, yet Alida's manner and appearance began to trouble him.
Even to his rather slow perception, she did not seem so happy as she
had been. She did not meet his eye with her old frank, friendly, and
as he had almost hoped, affectionate, expression; she seemed merely
feverishly anxious to do everything and have all as he wished. Instead
of acting with natural ease and saying what was in her mind without
premeditation, a conscious effort was visible and an apparent
solicitude that he should be satisfied. The inevitable result was that
he was more dissatisfied. "She's doing her best for me," he growled, as
he went back to his work, "and it begins to look as if it might wear
her out in time. Confound it! Having everything just so isn't of much
account when a man's heart-hungry. I'd rather have had one of her old
smiles and gone without my dinner. Well, well; how little a man
understands himself or knows the future! The day I married her I was
in mortal dread lest she should care for me too much and want to be
affectionate and all that; and here I am, discontented and moping
because everything has turned out as I then wished. Don't see as I'm
to blame, either. She had no business to grow so pretty. Then she
looked like a ghost, but now when the color come