p relaxed into a loose hold. "You are my dear wife now, and I will
try to be a good husband to you, Agatha."

Stooping forward, his lips just touched her cheek--which shrank from
him, Agatha scarcely knew why.

"I see!" he muttered to himself "Well, be it so! and God help us both!"

The carriage stopped. Honest Mr. James Thomycroft was at the door,
bidding a gay and full-hearted welcome to the bridegroom and bride.

What a marriage-day!

CHAPTER X.

"Are you quite warm there, Agatha?"

"Yes, thank you, quite warm," she said, turning round a little, and then
turning back. She sat working, or seeming to work, at a large bay window
that fronted the sea at Brighton. Already there had come over her the
slight but unmistakable change which indicates the wife--the girl no
longer. She had been married just one week.

Her husband sat at a table writing, as was his habit during the middle
of the day, in order that they might walk out in the evening. He had
often been thus busy during the week, even though it was the first week
of the honeymoon.

The honeymoon! How different the word now sounded to Agatha! Yet she had
nothing to complain of. Mr. Harper was very kind; watchful and tender
over her to a degree which she felt even more than she saw. In the
mornings he read to her, or talked, chiefly upon subjects higher and
withal pleasanter than Agatha had ever heard talked of before; in the
evenings they drove out or walked, till far into the starry summer
night. They were together constantly, there never passed between them a
quick or harsh word, and yet--

Agatha vainly tried to solve the dim, cloudy "yet" which had no tangible
form, and only arose now that the first bewilderment of her changed
existence was settling into reality, and she was beginning to recognise
herself as Agatha Harper, no longer a girl, but a married woman. The
sole conclusion she could come to was, that she must be now learning
what she supposed every one had to learn--that a honeymoon is not quite
the dream of bliss which young people believe in, and that few married
couples are quite happy during the first year of their union.

And Mrs. Harper (or Mrs. Locke Harper, as her husband had had printed on
the cards, omitting the name which she had once stigmatised as "ugly,")
was probably not altogether wide of the truth, though in this case
she judged from mistaken because individual evidence. It is next to
impossible that two lives, unless a