of a
large family. Both were handsome, self-willed young people; neither
had been used to contradiction. In spite of their love for each other,
there had been a strife of wills and misunderstandings from the
earliest days of their marriage. Neither knew what giving up meant,
and before many months were over the White House witnessed many
painful scenes. Herbert Cheyne was passionate, and at times almost
violent; but there was no malice in his nature. He stormed furiously
and forgave easily. A little forbearance would have turned him into a
sweet-natured man; but his wife's haughtiness and resentment lasted
long; she never acknowledged herself in the wrong, never made
overtures of peace, but bore herself on every occasion as a
sorely-injured wife, a state of things singularly provoking to a man
of Herbert Cheyne's irritable temperament.

There was injudicious partisanship as regarded their children: while
Mrs. Cheyne idolized her boy, her husband lavished most of his
attentions on the baby girl,--"papa's girl," as she always called
herself in opposition to "mother's boy."

Mrs. Cheyne really believed she loved her boy best, but when
diphtheria carried off her little Jane also, she was utterly
inconsolable. Her husband was far away when it happened: he had been a
great traveller before his marriage, and latterly his matrimonial
relations with his wife had been so unsatisfactory that virtual
separation had ensued. Two or three months before illness, and then
death, had devastated the nursery at the White House, he had set out
for a long exploring expedition in Central Africa.

"You make my life so unbearable that, but for the children, I would
never care to set foot in my home again," he had said to her, in one
of his violent moods; and, though he repented of this speech
afterwards, she could not be brought to believe that he had not meant
it, and her heart had been hard against him even in their parting.

But before many months were over she would have given all she
possessed--to her very life--to have recalled him to her side. She was
childless, and her health was broken; but no such recall was possible.
Vague rumors reached her of some miserable disaster: people talked of
a missing Englishman. One of the little party had already succumbed to
fever and hardship; by and by another followed; and the last news that
reached them was that Herbert Cheyne lay at the point of death in the
kraal of a friendly tribe. Since th