t
is nothing very desperate. Nothing has happened that is not of easy
remedy, while the remedy would leave you and her in a much better
position, both as regards your own estimation of yourselves and the
opinion of your friends."

"You are a little roundabout, Ingram," said Lavender, "and ornate. But
I suppose all lectures begin so. Go on."

Ingram laughed: "If I am too formal, it is because I don't want to
make mischief by any exaggeration. Look here! A long time before you
were married I warned you that Sheila had very keen and sensitive
notions about the duties that people ought to perform, about the
dignity of labor, about the proper occupations of a man, and so forth.
These notions you may regard as romantic and absurd, if you like, but
you might as well try to change the color of her eyes as attempt to
alter any of her beliefs in that direction."

"And she thinks that I am idle and indolent because I don't care what
a washerwoman pays for her candles?" said Lavender with impetuous
contempt. "Well, be it so. She is welcome to her opinion. But if she
is grieved at heart because I can't make hobnailed boots, it seems
to me that she might as well come and complain to myself, instead of
going and detailing her wrongs to a third person, and calling for his
sympathy in the character of an injured wife."

For an instant the dark eyes of the man opposite him blazed with a
quick fire, for a sneer at Sheila was worse than an insult to himself;
but he kept quite calm, and said, "That, unfortunately, is not what is
troubling her."

Lavender rose abruptly, took a turn up and down the empty room, and
said, "If there is anything the matter, I prefer to hear it from
herself. It is not respectful to me that she should call in a third
person to humor her whims and fancies."

"Whims and fancies!" said Ingram, with that dark light returning to
his eyes. "Do you know what you are talking about? Do you know that,
while you are living on the charity of a woman you despise, and
dawdling about the skirts of a woman who laughs at you, you are
breaking the heart of a girl who has not her equal in England? Whims
and fancies! Good God, I wonder how she ever could have--"

He stopped, but the mischief was done. These were not prudent words
to come from a man who wished to step in as a mediator between husband
and wife; but Ingram's blaze of wrath, kindled by what he considered
the insufferable insolence of Lavender in thus speaking of