rate, Margaret will make a good use of
his money."

"It isn't a question, my dear Mrs. Fairchild, of the use of money, but of
the use money makes of you. Yes, I do like Henderson, but I can't give up
my philosophy of life for the sake of one good fellow."

"Philosophy of fudge!" exclaimed my wife. And there really was no answer
to this.

After six weeks had passed, my wife paid a visit to Margaret. Nothing
could exceed the affectionate cordiality of her welcome. Margaret was
overjoyed to see her, to show the house, to have her know her husband
better, to take her into her new life. She was hardly yet over the naive
surprises of her lovely surroundings. Or if it is too mach to say that
her surprise had lasted six weeks--for it is marvelous how soon women
adapt themselves to new conditions if they are agreeable--she was in a
glow of wonder at her husband's goodness, at his love, which had procured
all this happiness for her.

"You have no idea," she said, "how thoughtful he is about everything--and
he makes so little of it all. I am to thank you, he tells me always, for
whatever pleases my taste in the house, and indeed I think I should have
known you had been here if he had not told me. There are so many little
touches that remind me of home. I am glad of that, for it is the more
likely to make you feel that it is your home also."

She clung to this idea in the whirl of the new life. In the first days
she dwelt much on this theme; indeed it was hardly second in her talk to
her worship--I can call it nothing less--of her husband. She liked to
talk of Brandon and the dear life there and the dearer friends--this much
talk about it showed that it was another life, already of the past, and
beginning to be distant in the mind. My wife had a feeling that Margaret,
thus early, was conscious of a drift, of a widening space, and was making
an effort to pull the two parts of her life together, that there should
be no break, as one carried away to sea by a resistless tide grasps the
straining rope that still maintains his slender connection with the
shore.

But it was all so different: the luxurious house, the carriage at call,
the box at the opera, the social duties inevitable with her own
acquaintances and the friends of her husband. She spoke of this in
moments of confidence, and when she was tired, with a consciousness that
it was a different life, but in no tone of regret, and I fancy that the
French blood in her veins,