ng on the same porch,
but I was alone now. My husband sat a few feet from me in his old
easy-chair, but no gulf could have parted us so wide and deeply. Robert
Manning had said I would have but one chance. Well, I had had it, and it
was gone. So I stood there, looking quietly at him and Jacky and the
boy. The child had pushed his father's wig off, and his bare head with
its thin iron-gray hair fell forward on his breast, resting on Teddy's
sleeping cheek. I saw now how broad and sad the forehead was,--the quiet
dignity on the whole face. Yet it had been such a simple-hearted thing
to do,--to buy that wig to please me! One of those little follies the
like of which would never come again.

I went in and sat down as usual, apart, throwing aside from my neck the
shawl which Jacky had pinned there, loathing anything she had touched,
so real and sharp was the thought about her become, as if the evening's
fog and cold had lent it a venomous life. They had made a quiet cozy
picture before, which had bitterly brought back our first married days,
but it was broken up now. The Doctor's three boys came lumbering in,
with muddy shoes, game-bags, and the usual fiery faces and loud jokes
after their day's sport. Jacky threw down her sewing, and went out to
see the squirrels drawn, and the Doctor smoothed Teddy's hair, looking
after them with a pleased smile. One of the rarest sparkles of our daily
life! It was a year since Doctor Manning had brought his children home.
They filled the house. Musing on the past now, and trying to look at
that year calmly, while I sat by the fire, my husband would fade back in
the picture into an unmeaning lay-figure. Was this my fault? Could I
help it, if God had made me with a different, clearer insight into life
and its uses than these people with their sound beef and muscle, their
uncouth rejoicing in being alive? There was work enough in them: a
broad-fisted grappling with the day's task or obstacle, a drinking of
its pain or success into their slow brains, but nowhere the metre to
note the soul's changes, nor the eye to speculate on them. "No," my
husband had said to me one day, "we Western people have the mass of this
country's appointed work to do, so we are content that God should
underlie the hypotheses. We waste no strength in guesses at the reason
why."

I remember how intolerably the days of that year dragged even in memory,
as I sat there trying to judge them fairly,--how other years of my