ep them straight for me against I
come home?"

"I know what it is," I cry, passionately clinging round his neck, "you
think I do not like you! I _see_ it! twenty times a day, in a hundred
things that you do and leave undone! but indeed, _indeed_, you never
were more mistaken in all your life! I will own to you that I did not
care _very_ much about you at first. I thought you good, and kind, and
excellent, but I was not _fond_ of you; but _now_, every day, every hour
that I live, I like you better! Ask Barbara, ask the boys if I do not! I
like you ten thousand times better than I did the day I married you!"

"_Like_ me!" he repeats a little dreamily, looking with a strong and
bitter yearning into my eyes; then, seeing that I am going to
asseverate, "for God's sake, child," he says, hastily, "do not tell me
that you _love_ me, for I know it is not true! you can no more help it
than I can help caring for you in the idiotic, mad way, that I do!
Perhaps, on some blessed, far-off day, you may be able to say so, and I
to believe it, but not now!--_not now_!"

CHAPTER XX.

With feet as heavy and slowly-dragging as those of some unwieldy old
person, with drooped figure, and stained and swollen face, I enter the
school-room an hour later to tell my ill-news.

"Enter a young mourner!" says Algy, facetiously, in unkind allusion to
the gloom of my appearance, which is perhaps heightened by the
black-silk gown I wear.

"What _is_ up?" cries Bobby, advancing toward me with an overpowering
curiosity, not unmixed with admiration, legible on his burnt face; "what
_has_ summoned those glorious sunset tints into your eyes and nose?"

"Which of Turner's pictures," says Algy, putting up his hand in the
shape of a spy-glass to one eye, and critically regarding me through it,
"is she so like in coloring? the 'Founding of Carthage,' or 'The
Fighting Temeraire?'"

"Shame! shame!" cries Bobby, in a mock hortatory tone, trying to swell
himself out to the shape and bulk of our fat rector, and to speak in his
wheezy tone, "that a young woman so richly dowered with the good things
of this life; a young woman with a husband and a deer-park in
possession, and a house-warming in prospect--"

"But I have not," interrupt I, speaking for the first time, and with a
snuffliness of tone engendered by much crying.

"Have not? have not _what_?"

"Have not a house-warming in prospect," reply I, with distinct
malignity. A moment's silence. M