was sheer fun for me in regard of the fact that Fyne's
too was a runaway match, which even got into the papers in its time,
because the late indignant poet had no discretion and sought to avenge
this outrage publicly in some absurd way before a bewigged judge. The
dejected gesture of little Fyne's hand disarmed my mocking mood. But I
could not help expressing my surprise that Mrs. Fyne had not detected at
once what was brewing. Women were supposed to have an unerring eye.

He told me that his wife had been very much engaged in a certain work. I
had always wondered how she occupied her time. It was in writing. Like
her husband she too published a little book. Much later on I came upon
it. It had nothing to do with pedestrianism. It was a sort of hand-book
for women with grievances (and all women had them), a sort of compendious
theory and practice of feminine free morality. It made you laugh at its
transparent simplicity. But that authorship was revealed to me much
later. I didn't of course ask Fyne what work his wife was engaged on;
but I marvelled to myself at her complete ignorance of the world, of her
own sex and of the other kind of sinners. Yet, where could she have got
any experience? Her father had kept her strictly cloistered. Marriage
with Fyne was certainly a change but only to another kind of
claustration. You may tell me that the ordinary powers of observation
ought to have been enough. Why, yes! But, then, as she had set up for a
guide and teacher, there was nothing surprising for me in the discovery
that she was blind. That's quite in order. She was a profoundly
innocent person; only it would not have been proper to tell her husband
so.

CHAPTER THREE--THRIFT--AND THE CHILD

But there was nothing improper in my observing to Fyne that, last night,
Mrs. Fyne seemed to have some idea where that enterprising young lady had
gone to. Fyne shook his head. No; his wife had been by no means so
certain as she had pretended to be. She merely had her reasons to think,
to hope, that the girl might have taken a room somewhere in London, had
buried herself in town--in readiness or perhaps in horror of the
approaching day--

He ceased and sat solemnly dejected, in a brown study. "What day?" I
asked at last; but he did not hear me apparently. He diffused such
portentous gloom into the atmosphere that I lost patience with him.

"What on earth are you so dismal about?" I cried, being genuin