r else--how very very wrong am I!
What can be the reason that we torture each other so?"

"Fate!" he cried, pacing wildly up and down. "Fate! that has netted
us both to our own misery--nay, worse--to make us the misery of one
another. Yet how could I know? You seemed a young simple girl, free to
love--I felt sure I could make you love me. Poor dupe that I was! Oh,
why did I ever see you, Agatha Bowen?"

He snatched his wife on his knee, and kissed her repeatedly--madly--just
as he had done on the morning of their wedding-day; never since! Then he
let her go--almost with coldness.

"There--I will not vex you. I must not be foolish any more."

Foolish! He thought it foolish to show that he loved her! Without
replying, Agatha sat down on the bench where her husband placed her. He
might say what he liked: she was very patient now.

He began to explain his reasons for taking the house; that he had
naturally more acquaintance with worldly matters than she had; that
whatever their income, it was advisable for young people to begin
housekeeping prudently, since it was easy to increase small beginnings,
while of all outward domestic horrors there was nothing greater than the
horror of running into debt. When he talked thus, at once with wisdom
and gentleness, Agatha began to forgive him.

"After all," said she, brightening, "your prudence--which I might
call by a harder word, but I'll be good now--your prudence is only
restraining me in my little pleasures, and I don't much mind. But if you
ever tried to restrain me in a matter of kindness, as you did yesterday,
only I guessed the motive"--

"Did you?"

"There--don't look so startled and displeased. I saw you did not like
the _eclat_ of political charities. But another time, if I want to do
good--like Anne Valery, only in a very, very much smaller way--Hark!
what is that noise?"

It was a decent-looking working-man, standing out in the pouring rain,
watching them through the panes, and rattling angrily at the locked
conservatory-door.

"What a fierce eye! It looks quite wolfish. What can he want with us?"

"I will go and see. Some labourer wanting work, probably; but the fellow
has no business to come beckoning and interrupting. Stay here, Agatha."

"No--I will come with you." And she tripped after her husband, the
momentary content of her heart creating a longing to do good--a sort of
tithe of happiness thankfully paid to Heaven.

Nathanael unfastened the glass-