s.

"_Scores_ of times!" I answer, letting my head drop on his shoulder, and
not taking the trouble to raise it again.

"I never _used_ to think myself of a very nervous turn!" he says,
presently, with a smile. "Nancy, you will laugh at me, but I assure you
upon my honor that all the way home I have been in the most abject and
deadly fright: at every puff of wind I thought we were infallibly going
to the bottom: whenever the carriage rocked in the least to-day on the
way down, I made up my mind we were going to smash! Little woman, what
can a bit of a thing like you have done to me to make me seem so much
more valuable to myself than I have ever done these eight-and-forty
years?"

I think no answer to this so suitable and seemly as a dumb friction of
my left cheek against the rough cloth of the shoulder on which it has
reposed itself.

"Talk to me, Nancy!" he says, in a quiet half-whisper of happiness. "Let
me hear the sound of your voice! I am sick of my own; I have had a glut
of that all these weary eight months; tell me about them all! How are
they all? how are the boys?" (with a playful smile of recollection at
what used to be my _one_ subject, the one theme on which I was wont to
wax illimitably diffuse). But now, at the magic name no pleasant
garrulity overcomes me; only the remembrance of my worries; of all those
troubles that I mean now to transfer from my own to Roger's broad
shoulders, swoop down upon me.

I raise my head and speak with a clouded brow and a complaining tone.

"The Brat has gone back to Oxford," I say, gloomily; "Bobby has gone to
Hong-Kong, and Algy has gone to _the dogs_--or at least is going there
as hard as he can!"

"_To the dogs?_" (with an accent of surprise and concern); "what do you
mean? what has sent him there?"

"You had better ask Mrs. Zephine," reply I, bitterly, thinking, with a
lively exasperation, of the changed and demoralized Algy I had last
seen--soured, headstrong, and unhinged.

"_Zephine!_" (repeating the name with an accent of thorough
astonishment), "what on earth can _she_ have to say to it?"

"Ah, _what_?" reply I, with oracular spite; then, overcome with remorse
at the thought of the way in which I was embittering the first moments
of his return, I rebury my face in his shoulder.

"I will tell you about that to-morrow," I say; "to-day is a good day,
and we will talk only of good things and of good people."

He does not immediately answer. My remark see