d in the meantime what should he do?
How would Marion take it? Why had he not told her before he went away?
But he had known it himself only a few days.

"Oh, my dear wife, would that we could commence life as we did when we
were first married!" he groaned.

His mind went back to the past. He looked again into her sweet, girlish
face, into her clear, earnest eyes. He remembered how they had both
desired to live a religious life, how he, having been brought up in a
religious home, undertook in vain to explain the Bible where it was dark
and unreasonable to her. He remembered how fruitlessly she had tried to
be converted, and that he had found even through her earnest seeking
that he had naught but the letter of religion and was also as helpless
as to the manner of salvation. And then they had given up trying. She
sought, for a while, to satisfy herself by doing for others, giving her
time and energy to the poor that found her out and besieged her for
favors, while he had been satisfied to let religion alone and believe
with the majority concerning the doctrines and dogmas.

As the years went on, and prosperity came to them, he had grown more and
more indifferent, and finally, when they moved away from their early
home and entered a new city, they had begun a new life, as it were.

He remembered, regretfully, that she had entered the competitive ranks
of society, at his wish at first, because he thought it would add to his
popularity as a merchant and increase the number and quality of his
customers. Too well he remembered that the elegant parties and party
costumes were first his own instigation, and now that these were likely
to be taken away, he felt responsible for her happiness, and had a
secret misgiving, born of his early religious training perhaps, of
retribution and judgment. He hoped indeed that she would be able to
rise above circumstances, but he was utterly at a loss to know how she
would take it, for although he knew that deep down in her heart were
still traces of the early longings, he felt vaguely there was no way to
satisfy them any more now than in the past, and probably they would only
increase the difficulty of finding happiness.

John Hayden was kind-hearted and upright in all his ways, strictly
honest and conscientious, but apt to be a little one-sided in his
judgments, simply because, as a rule, he reasoned from one standpoint,
thought in one groove. He had never considered the questions from t