den or to
some other place. How could I care? I told him I would go anywhere
he chose to take me. Then he told me I was heartless;--and I
acknowledged that I was heartless. 'I am heartless,' I said. 'Tell me
something I don't know.'"

"Oh, Cora, why did you say that?"

"I didn't choose to contradict my husband. Besides, it's true. Then
he threw the Bradshaw away, and all the maps flew about. So I picked
them up again, and said we'd go to Switzerland first. I knew that
would settle it, and of course he decided on stopping at Baden. If he
had said Jericho, it would have been the same thing to me. Wouldn't
you like to go to Jericho?"

"I should have no special objection to Jericho."

"But you are to go to Baden instead."

"I've said nothing about that yet. But you have not told me half your
story. Why is Mr Palliser going abroad in the middle of Parliament in
this way?"

"Ah; now I must go back to the beginning. And indeed, Alice, I hardly
know how to tell you; not that I mind you knowing it, only there are
some things that won't get themselves told. You can hardly guess what
it is that he is giving up. You must swear that you won't repeat what
I'm going to tell you now?"

"I'm not a person apt to tell secrets, but I shan't swear anything."

"What a woman you are for discretion! it is you that ought to be
Chancellor of the Exchequer; you are so wise. Only you haven't
brought your own pigs to the best market, after all."

"Never mind my own pigs now, Cora."

"I do mind them, very much. But the secret is this. They have asked
Mr Palliser to be Chancellor of the Exchequer, and he has--refused.
Think of that!"

"But why?"

"Because of me,--of me, and my folly, and wickedness, and
abominations. Because he has been fool enough to plague himself with
a wife--he who of all men ought to have kept himself free from such
troubles. Oh, he has been so good! It is almost impossible to make
any one understand it. If you could know how he has longed for this
office;--how he has worked for it day and night, wearing his eyes out
with figures when everybody else has been asleep, shutting himself up
with such creatures as Mr Bott when other men have been shooting and
hunting and flirting and spending their money. He has been a slave to
it for years,--all his life I believe,--in order that he might sit
in the Cabinet, and be a minister and a Chancellor of the Exchequer.
He has hoped and feared, and has been, I believe, sometim