appropriateness in the
picture--and broadly hinted my private idea that the perfect woman
was fulfilled in Mad!--lively, faulty Mad! Your sisters were very
anxious to read the passage which I had selected for your study, and
from which I was evidently pointing a moral; but you closed the book
abruptly in the old seat behind the round tea-table with the brass
rim. I suppose the sisters don't know the passage to this day?

"Having been fickle, I was a great deal better off in my wife than I
deserved. Remember, Mad, my wife and the mother of my children was a
good woman; I was reasonably happy with her, and I trust I bore her
tender reverence. She died and left me with our children two winters
ago. When we meet again, it will be where there is neither marrying
nor giving in marriage. Now, when I can do her no wrong, I think of
another to whom I did wrong; than whom there was never another to me
the same--no, nothing like it. Learning that Mad has been true--oh!
Mad, _you_ could never have been anything else but true--I have
wondered whether I might not be allowed to do something to atone,
whether I was not worth having still, and whether I could not--a
bold phrase, but it will out--make it up to Mad, a solitary single
woman, a teacher in a school. Oh! Mad, I say again, what a hard fate
for you!

"I cannot offer an immense inducement. I am not a merchant prince,
though I am richer than I was in the old days; yet somehow I do not
care to boast of my riches to Mad, and I am a widower with two small
children--not models. I dare not send you my _carte_, and I don't
want yours. You are always the same Mad to me that you have been
through all those years, and will be to the end of the chapter,
whether you answer me yes or no. You will answer yes. You were
always great for magnanimity, and flamed up on it, dark eyes, white
cheeks, and all, when you were a wild lassie. Don't tell me you are
less magnanimous as a brave, hard-working woman, or you will sap my
faith in womankind.

"Mad, how this Christmas season stirs me with the far-off murmurs of
another Christmas, when you and I pulled the holly and the other
thing--the thing with the tiny, fair, frost-bitten clusters of
blossom--some sort of laurel wasn't it? That old Christmas, who can
describe? What glamour over the prosaic family dinn