y, he even crossed over the way to
speak to an acquaintance, and stood smiling, talking, and swinging his
cane. There could not be anything very wrong, then.

Agatha thought, having been once sent out of the room, she would not
re-enter it until her husband fetched her--a harmless ebullition of
annoyance. So she stood idly before the mirror, ostensibly arranging her
curls, though in reality seeing nothing, but listening with all her
ears for the one footstep--which did not come. Not, alas! for many, many
minutes.

She was still standing motionless, though her brows were knitted in deep
thought, and her mouth had assumed the rather cross expression which
such rich, rare lips always can, and which only makes their smiling the
more lovely--when she saw in the mirror another reflection beside her
own.

Her husband had come softly behind her, and put his arms round her
waist.

"Did you think I was a long time away from you? I could not help it,
dear. Let us go down-stairs now."

Agatha was surprised that, in spite of all the tenderness of his manner,
he did not attempt the slightest explanation. And still more surprised
was she to find her own questions, wonderings, reproaches, dying
away unuttered in the atmosphere of silentness which always seemed to
surround Nathanael Harper. This silentness had from the very beginning
of their acquaintance induced in her that faint awe, which is the most
ominous yet most delicious feeling that a woman can have towards a
man. It seems an instinctive acknowledgment of the much-condemned,
much-perverted, yet divine and unalterable law given with the first
human marriage--"_He shall rule over thee_."

After all that Agatha had intended to say, she said--nothing. She only
turned her face to her husband, and received his kiss. Very soft it
was--even cold--as though he dared not trust himself to the least
expression of feeling. He merely whispered, "Now, come down with me;"
and she went.

But on the staircase she could not forbear saying, "I thought you two
would never have done talking. Is it anything very serious? I trust not,
since your brother walked down the street so cheerfully."

"Did he?--and--were you watching him?"

"Yes, indeed," returned Agatha, for she had no notion of doing anything
that she would be afterwards ashamed to confess. "But what put him into
such a state of mind, and made him behave to me so strangely?"

"How dared he behave?" asked the husband, with quick