ual agreement with him. But the fact was that he was jealous
of his wife, not in the ordinary vulgar way, for which there was no
possibility, but for every year of additional age, and every experience,
and all the life she had led apart from him. He could not endure to
think that she had formed the most of her ideas before she knew him:
the thought of her past was horrible to him. A suspicion that she was
thinking of that, that her mind was going back to something which he
did not know, awoke a sort of madness in his brain. All this she knew
by painful intuition now, as at first by discoveries which startled her
very soul, and seemed to disturb the pillars of the world. She was aware
of the forced control he kept over himself, not to burst forth upon her,
and she would have fled morally, and brought herself round to his ideas
and sworn eternal faith to him, if it would have done any good. But she
knew very well that his uneasy nature would not be satisfied with that.

"I might have divined," he said, after a long pause, during which they
went quickly along, he increasing his pace unawares, she losing her breath
in keeping up with him, "that you would see this matter differently. But
I must ask, at least, that you won't circumvent us, and neutralise all
our plans. The only thing for Chatty to do is to drop it altogether, to
receive no more letters, to cut the whole concern. It is a disreputable
business altogether. It is better she should never marry at all than
marry in that way."

"I feel sure, Theo, that except in this way she will never marry at
all--if you think that matters."

"If I think that matters! It is not very flattering to me that you
should think it doesn't matter," he said.

And then they reached their house, and he followed her into the
drawing-room, where one dim lamp was burning, and the room had a
deserted look. Perhaps that last speech had been a little unkind.
Compunction visited him not unfrequently. He seated himself at the
little table on which the lamp was standing, as she took off her hat
and recovered her breath. "Since we are at home, and alone for once
in a way," he said, more graciously, "which happens seldom enough, I'll
read to you for an hour, if you like, Frances; that is, if you have no
letters to write."

There was a little irony in the last words, for Lady Markland had, if
the truth must be told, a foible that way, and liked, as so many women
do, the idea of having a large corre