ite conscious that he had been guilty of a grievous
error in not telling Fay about Margaret before she became his wife; he
wished he had done so from the bottom of his heart; but
procrastination made the duty a far more difficult one; he felt it
would be so awkward to tell her now, he could not tell how she might
take it: it might make her unhappy, poor little thing; it would be a
pity to dim her brightness.

He was sheltering his moral weakness under these plausible excuses,
but somehow they failed to satisfy his conscience. He knew he had done
a mean thing to marry Fay when his heart was solely and entirely
Margaret's; what sort of blessing could attach to such a union?

But when Fay begged him to tell her the cause of his estrangement from
the Ferrers, he positively shrunk from, the painful ordeal--he was not
fit for it, he told himself, his nerves were disorganized, and Fay
looked far from well; some day he would tell her, but not now; and the
old sharpness was in his voice as he answered her.

"I can not tell you; you should not tease me so, Fay. I think you
might have a little faith in your husband."

"Very well, dear, I will not ask," she replied, gently; but the tears
sprung to her eyes in the darkness. She would not think him hard if
she could help it; of course she was young--ah, terribly young--and
Hugh was so much older and wiser. The "Polite Match-Maker" had told
her that husbands and wives were to have no secrets from each other;
but she supposed that when the wife was so much younger it made a
difference--perhaps when she got older, and knew more about things,
Hugh would tell her more. She longed to grow older--it would be years
before she would be twenty; why? she was only seventeen last month.

Hugh thought his Wee Wifie was tired, and tried to coax her to go to
sleep; he brought her another cushion, and attended to the fire, and
then went away to leave her to her nap. Fay would rather have had him
stay and talk to her, but she was too unselfish to say so; she lay in
her pretty room watching the fire-light play on the walls, and
thinking first of her husband and then of Margaret. She longed with a
vague wistfulness that she were more like that lovely Miss Ferrers,
and then, perhaps, Hugh would care to talk to her. Were the creeping
shadows bringing her strange thoughts? Fay could not have told any one
why there were tears on her cheeks; was the consciousness beginning to
dawn upon her that she was