ness, then stopped.
"Forgive me. You know, I have never inquired--I never shall inquire
about anything."--Again he paused, seeing how his mood alarmed her. "Do
not be afraid of me! Poor child--poor little Agatha!"

Waiting for no reply, he led her in to dinner.

While the servants waited, Mr. Harper scarcely spoke, except when
necessary. Only in his lightest word addressed to Agatha was a certain
tremulousness--in his most careless look a constant tender observance,
which soothed her mind, and quite removed from thence the impression
of his hasty and incomprehensible words. She laid all to the charge of
Major Harper and his unpleasant business.

At dessert, Nathanael sat varying his long silences with a few
commonplace remarks which showed how oblivious he was of all around
him, and how sedulously he tried to disguise the fact, and rise to the
surface of conversation. Agatha's curiosity returned, not unmingled with
a feeling tenderer, more woman-like, more wife-like, which showed itself
in stray peeps at him from under the lashes of net brown eyes. At length
she took courage to say:

"Now--since we seem to have nothing better to talk about, will you tell
me what you and your brother were plotting together, that you kept poor
little me out of the room so long?"

"Plotting together? Surely, Agatha, you did not mean to use that word?"

She had used it according to a habit she had of putting a jesting form
of phrase upon matters where she was most in earnest. She was amazed to
see her husband take it so seriously.

"Well, blot out the offending word, and put in any other you choose;
only tell me."

"Why do you wish to know, little Curiosity?" said he, recovering
himself, and eagerly catching the tone his wife had adopted.

"Why? Because I am a little Curiosity, and like to know everything."

"That is both presumptuous and impossible, your ladyship! If one-half
the world were always bent on knowing all the secrets of the other half,
what a very uncomfortable world it would be!"

"I do not see that, even if the first half included the wives, and the
second the husbands; which is apparently what you mean to imply."

"I shall not plead guilty to anything by implication."

They went on a few moments longer in this skirmish of assumed gaiety,
when Agatha, pausing, leant her elbows on the table, and looked
seriously at her husband,

"Do you know we are two very foolish people?"

"Wherefore?"

"We are pretending