es her defiant pride which has been aroused by no fault of his.

"I shall expect the girls to make their home with me until they are
married," he continues. "I think that old English custom of having one
home centre is right, and as I am the elder it is my place to provide
it. I do not know as I shall be able to keep up the lavish scale of my
father's day," and he sighs.

Mrs. Grandon remembers well that there was a great complaint of bills
in her husband's time, and that Eugene has been frightfully extravagant
since. He is off pleasuring, and the other is here planning and
toiling. There is a small sense of injustice, but she salves her
conscience with the idea that it is an executor's bounden duty, and
that Floyd has had nothing but pleasure and idleness in his time.

It is late when he goes to his room to toss and tumble about
restlessly, and feel dissatisfied with the result of his work. Has he
been unfilial, unbrotherly? Surely every man has some rights in his own
life, his own aims. But has he done the best with his? Was it wise to
marry Violet? In a certain way she _is_ dear to him; she has saved his
child for him,--his whole heart swells in gratitude. As for the love,
the love that is talked of and written about, or the overmastering
passion a man might experience for Madame Lepelletier, neither tempts
him. A quiet, friendly regard that will allow him to go his own way,
choose his own pursuits, command his own time, if a man must have a
wife; and he knows in his secret heart of hearts that he really does
not care to have a wife, that it will not materially add to his
happiness.

"I ought not to have married her," he admits to himself in a
conscience-stricken way, "but there was nothing else to do. And I
surely can make her happy, she is satisfied with such a little."

His conscience pricks him there. Is he to turn niggard and dole out to
her a few crumbs of regard and tenderness? to let her take from the
child what the husband ought to give? If there were no contrasting
memory, no secret sense of weariness amid kisses and caresses and
caprices pretty enough for occasional use, the dessert of love's
feasts, but never really touching the man's deeper life.

"It must be that some important elements have been left out of my
composition," he ruminates, grimly. Could even madame have moved him to
a headlong passion? Would there not come satiety even with her?
Certainly Cecil's welfare was to be considered in a s