ed to minister to
your and Mr. Demorest's Sabbath pleasures."

Blandford did not wait for a further suggestion. When the door had
closed behind him, Mrs. Blandford went to the mantel-shelf, where a
grimly allegorical clock cut down the hours and minutes of men with a
scythe, and consulted it with a slight knitting of her pretty eyebrows.
Then she fell into a vague abstraction, standing before the open book
on the centre-table. Then she closed it with a snap, and methodically
putting it exactly in the middle of the top of a black cabinet in the
corner, lifted the shaded lamp in her hand and passed slowly with it up
the stairs to her bedroom, where her light steps were heard moving to
and fro. In a few moments she reappeared, stopping for a moment in the
hall with the lighted lamp as if to watch and listen for her husband's
return. Seen in that favorable light, her cheeks had caught a delicate
color, and her dark eyes shone softly. Putting the lamp down in exactly
the same place as before, she returned to the cabinet for the book,
brought it again to the table, opened it at the page where she had
placed her perforated cardboard book-marker, sat down beside it, and
with her hands in her lap and her eyes on the page began abstractedly to
tear a small piece of paper into tiny fragments. When she had reduced it
to the smallest shreds, she scraped the pieces out of her silk lap and
again collected them in the pink hollow of her little hand, kneeling
down on the scrupulously well-swept carpet to peck up with a bird-like
action of her thumb and forefinger an escaped atom here and there. These
and the contents of her hand she poured into the chilly cavity of a
sepulchral-looking alabaster vase that stood on the etagere. Returning
to her old seat, and making a nest for her clasped fingers in the lap
of her dress, she remained in that attitude, her shoulders a little
narrowed and bent forward, until her husband returned.

"I've lit the fire in the bedroom for you to change your clothes by,"
she said, as he entered; then evading the caress which this wifely
attention provoked, by bending still more primly over her book, she
added, "Go at once. You're making everything quite damp here."

He returned in a few moments in his slippers and jacket, but evidently
found the same difficulty in securing a conjugal and confidential
contiguity to his wife. There was no apparent social centre or nucleus
of comfort in the apartment; its firepla