for their sleeping-chamber.

"Certainly," he said; "most certainly if she wished."

He, himself, had not slept there since the night of his first wife's
death, he told her. Told her, too, that before leaving for their
wedding-trip, he had given orders to have one of the other rooms
prepared against their return. The reason this had not been done, the
invaluable parlour-maid had informed him, was because the wardrobe he
had particularly desired to be moved there had proved too big for the
niche which was to have received it. Wardrobe or no wardrobe, however,
since she wished it, they would migrate on the morrow.

"You do wish it?" he asked her.

She nodded, softly striking her chords.

"I wonder why? You are no more superstitious or fanciful than I."

She shook her head, bending forward to study the score of the music on
the desk, one of Sullivan's operas they had heard together at Brighton.
He, sitting close behind her, his chin touching her shoulder, had fixed
his eyes on the music too, although he could not read a note of it.
"Horrid thoughts came to me there," she said. "I don't think, love, I
shall ever like to be alone in that room."

He named the invaluable maid. "Have her up to dress you," he advised.

The Bride shrugged her shoulders, and her fingers moved more quickly in
a livelier movement. "We will change the room," she said.

Later, he had placed himself on the rug at her feet, and she, leaning
forward in the armchair drawn over the fire, had her arm about his neck
while he talked to her of himself, she questioning. Of his early life
he talked, and what had been for and what against him; of his later
success, and his old ambitions.

"All achieved now," he said, and turned to smile at her the curious,
characteristic smile accomplished by a twist of a closed lip.

"I have not bored you?" he asked her with anxiety, when the evening was
over. "Except to you, I have never in my life talked of myself. It is a
luxury in which I must not too much indulge."

She reassured him with the zeal of the newly-wedded, much loved and
loving wife. "Promise me that you will always tell me all, that you
will never keep a secret from me," she said; and he promised, smiling
upon her with his twisted lip.

"If you do," she cried, fondly threatening, "I shall know it,
Sleep-talker! I shall ask you in your sleep and you will tell me all."

That, under those circumstances, he should probably tell her much that
had no