emed to him impossible that he should ever confess
to her the truth about Eppie: she would never recover from the
repulsion the story of his earlier marriage would create, told to her
now, after that long concealment. And the child, too, he thought, must
become an object of repulsion: the very sight of her would be painful.
The shock to Nancy's mingled pride and ignorance of the world's evil
might even be too much for her delicate frame. Since he had married
her with that secret on his heart, he must keep it there to the last.
Whatever else he did, he could not make an irreparable breach between
himself and this long-loved wife.

Meanwhile, why could he not make up his mind to the absence of children
from a hearth brightened by such a wife? Why did his mind fly uneasily
to that void, as if it were the sole reason why life was not thoroughly
joyous to him? I suppose it is the way with all men and women who
reach middle age without the clear perception that life never _can_ be
thoroughly joyous: under the vague dullness of the grey hours,
dissatisfaction seeks a definite object, and finds it in the privation
of an untried good. Dissatisfaction seated musingly on a childless
hearth, thinks with envy of the father whose return is greeted by young
voices--seated at the meal where the little heads rise one above
another like nursery plants, it sees a black care hovering behind every
one of them, and thinks the impulses by which men abandon freedom, and
seek for ties, are surely nothing but a brief madness. In Godfrey's
case there were further reasons why his thoughts should be continually
solicited by this one point in his lot: his conscience, never
thoroughly easy about Eppie, now gave his childless home the aspect of
a retribution; and as the time passed on, under Nancy's refusal to
adopt her, any retrieval of his error became more and more difficult.

On this Sunday afternoon it was already four years since there had been
any allusion to the subject between them, and Nancy supposed that it
was for ever buried.

"I wonder if he'll mind it less or more as he gets older," she thought;
"I'm afraid more. Aged people feel the miss of children: what would
father do without Priscilla? And if I die, Godfrey will be very
lonely--not holding together with his brothers much. But I won't be
over-anxious, and trying to make things out beforehand: I must do my
best for the present."

With that last thought Nancy roused herse