ee some
blind fiddler or beggar. It is really too bad of you, Sheila, to be so
forgetful: what if Lady Leveret, for example, had come into that shop?
It seems to me you are never satisfied with meeting the people
you ought to meet, but that you must go and associate with all the
wretched cripples and beggars you can find. You should remember you
are a woman, and not a child--that people will talk about what you
do if you go on in this mad way. Do you ever see Mrs. Kavanagh or her
daughter do any of these things?"

Sheila had let go his hand: her eyes were still turned toward the
ground. She had fancied that a little of that emotion that had been
awakened in him by the story of the German mother and her son might
warm his heart toward herself, and render it possible for her to talk
to him frankly about all that she had been dimly thinking, and more
definitely suffering. She was mistaken: that was all.

"I will try to do better, and please you," she said; and then she went
away.

CHAPTER XV.

A FRIEND IN NEED.

Was it a delusion that had grown up in the girl's mind, and now held
full possession of it--that she was in a world with which she had no
sympathy, that she should never be able to find a home there, that
the influences of it were gradually and surely stealing from her her
husband's love and confidence? Or was this longing to get away
from the people and the circumstances that surrounded her but the
unconscious promptings of an incipient jealousy? She did not question
her own mind closely on these points. She only vaguely knew that she
was miserable, and that she could not tell her husband of the weight
that pressed on her heart.

Here, too, as they drove along to have tea with a certain Lady
Leveret, who was one of Lavender's especial patrons, and to whom he
had introduced Mrs. Kavanagh and her daughter, Sheila felt that
she was a stranger, an interloper, a "third wheel to the cart." She
scarcely spoke a word. She looked at the sea, but she had almost
grown to regard that great plain of smooth water as a melancholy and
monotonous thing--not the bright and boisterous sea of her youth, with
its winding channels, its secret bays and rocks, its salt winds and
rushing waves. She was disappointed with the perpetual wall of white
cliff, where she had expected to see something of the black and rugged
shore of the North. She had as yet made no acquaintance with the
sea-life of the place: she did not know w