cottages we glimpsed, the sight of distant, stately mansions
on green slopes caused Maude to cry out with rapture:--"Oh, Hugh, there's
a manor-house!"

More vivid than were the experiences themselves of that journey are the
memories of them. We went to windswept, Sabbath-keeping Edinburgh, to
high Stirling and dark Holyrood, and to Abbotsford. It was through Sir
Walter's eyes we beheld Melrose bathed in autumn light, by his aid
repeopled it with forgotten monks eating their fast-day kale.

And as we sat reading and dreaming in the still, sunny corners I forgot,
that struggle for power in which I had been so furiously engaged since
leaving Cambridge. Legislatures, politicians and capitalists receded into
a dim background; and the gift I had possessed, in youth, of living in a
realm of fancy showed astonishing signs of revival.

"Why, Hugh," Maude exclaimed, "you ought to have been a writer!"

"You've only just begun to fathom my talents," I replied laughingly. "Did
you think you'd married just a dry old lawyer?"

"I believe you capable of anything," she said....

I grew more and more to depend on her for little things.

She was a born housewife. It was pleasant to have her do all the packing,
while I read or sauntered in the queer streets about the inns. And she
took complete charge of my wardrobe.

She had a talent for drawing, and as we went southward through England
she made sketches of the various houses that took our fancy--suggestions
for future home-building; we spent hours in the evenings in the inn
sitting-rooms incorporating new features into our residence, continually
modifying our plans. Now it was a Tudor house that carried us away, now a
Jacobean, and again an early Georgian with enfolding wings and a
wrought-iron grill. A stage of bewilderment succeeded.

Maude, I knew, loved the cottages best. She said they were more
"homelike." But she yielded to my liking for grandeur.

"My, I should feel lost in a palace like that!" she cried, as we gazed at
the Marquis of So-and-So's country-seat.

"Well, of course we should have to modify it," I admitted.
"Perhaps--perhaps our family will be larger."

She put her hand on my lips, and blushed a fiery red....

We examined, with other tourists, at a shilling apiece historic mansions
with endless drawing-rooms, halls, libraries, galleries filled with
family portraits; elaborate, formal bedrooms where famous sovereigns had
slept, all roped off and carpeted