ler's memory. The book of
sketches had been left to him, and he was very fond of it.

As Margaret gave it to him he saw her face more clearly, saw the traces
of tears under the dark lashes. "Yes, go and rest," he said,
compassionately; "go to bed. I should reproach myself very much if I
thought it was waiting upon me, care about me, that had tired you so."

"No, I have very little to do; the men do everything," Margaret
answered. "I haven't half as much to attend to here as I have at home."
She seemed to wish to reassure him on this point.

"At home?" said Lanse, jocularly. "What are you talking about? This is
your home, isn't it?--wherever I happen to be."

But evidently his wife's self-control had been rudely shaken when her
tears had mastered her, for now she could not answer him, she turned and
left the room.

"Courage!" he called after her as she went towards the door. "You should
do as I do--not mind trifles; you should shake them off."

She went with a swift step to her own room, and threw herself face
downward upon a low couch, her head resting upon her clasped hands; the
sudden movement loosened her hair, soon it began to slip from its
fastenings and drop over her shoulders in a thick, soft, perfumed mass;
then, falling forward, lock by lock, the long ends touched the floor.

As she lay thus behind her bolted doors, fighting with an unhappiness so
deep that her whole heart was sobbing and crying, though now she did
not shed outwardly a tear, her husband, stroking his brown beard
meditatively, was getting a great deal of enjoyment out of poor
Malleson's book. Lanse had a very delicate taste in such matters; he
knew a beautiful outline when he saw it, from a single palmetto against
the blue, on a point in the St. John's, to these low reliefs of the
sweetest sculptor of the Renaissance. Long before, he had told Margaret
that he married her for her profile; slim, unformed girl as she was,
there had been, from the first moment he saw her, an immense
satisfaction for his eyes in the poise of her head and the clearness of
her features every time she entered the room.

Whether he would have found any satisfaction in these same outlines,
could he have seen them prone in their present abandonment, only himself
could have told.

He would have said, probably, that he found no satisfaction at all.
Lansing Harold, as has been remarked before, had a great deal of
benevolence.

CHAPTER XXVI.

"I don't kno