my life was I in a
passion before."

"Is it my fault then?" said he, mournfully.

"Yes, yours. It is you who stir up all these bad feelings in me.. I was
a good girl, a happy girl, before you married me."

"Was it so? Then you shall be held blameless. Poor child--poor child!"

His unutterable regret, his entire prostration, stung her to the heart,
and silenced her for the moment; but speedily she burst out again:

"You call me a child--so perhaps I am, in years; but you should have
thought of that before. You married me, and made me a woman. You took
away my gay childish heart, and yet in all humiliating things you still
treat me like a child."

"Do I?" He answered mechanically, out of thoughts that lay deep down,
far below the surface of his wife's bitter words. These last awoke
in him not one ray of anger--not even when at last, in a fit of
uncontrollable petulance, she tore his hand from before his eyes,
bidding him look at her--if he dared.

"Yes, I dare." And the look she courted, arose steady, sorrowful, like
that of a man who turns his eyes upward, hopeless yet faithful, out of a
wrecked ship. "Whatever has been, or may come, God knows that, from the
first, I did love you, Agatha."

Wherefore had he used the word "did!" Why could she not smother down
the unwonted pang, the new craving? Or rather, why could she not throw
herself in his arms and cry out, "Do you love me--do you love me now?"
Pride--pride only--the restless wild nature upon which his reserve fell
like water upon fire, without the blending spirit of conscious love
which often makes two opposite temperaments result in closest union.

Nevertheless, she was somewhat soothed, and began to compress the mass
of imaginary wrongs into the one little wrong which had originated it
all.

"What made you take a liking to that miserable house? I hate small
rooms--I cannot breathe in them--I have never been used to a little
house. Why must I now? I am not going to be extravagant--nobody could be
if they tried, in a poor place like Kingcombe. Since you _will_
insist on our living there, and _will_ carry out your cruel pride of
independence"--

"Cruel--oh, Agatha!" He absolutely groaned.

"Wishing no extravagance, I do wish for comfort--perhaps some little
elegance--as I have had all my life."

"You shall have it still, Agatha," her husband muttered. "I will coin my
heart's blood into gold but you shall have it."

"Now you are talking barbarously! O