ow. If there were people who thought
otherwise, I never heard that they turned their backs on him, or failed
in that civility which he never laid aside in his intercourse with
others.

If a man present a smiling front to the world under extreme trial, is not
that all that can be expected of him? Shall he not be excused for showing
a little irritation at home when things go badly? Henderson was as
good-humored a man as I ever knew, and he loved Margaret, he was proud of
her, he trusted her. Since when did the truest love prevent a man from
being petulant, even to the extent of wounding those he best loves,
especially if the loved one shows scruples when sympathy is needed? The
reader knows that the present writer has no great confidence in the
principle of Carmen; but if she had been married, and her husband had
wrecked an insurance company and appropriated all the surplus belonging
to the policy-holders, I don't believe she would have nagged him about
it.

And yet Margaret loved Henderson with her whole soul. And in this stage
of her progress in the world she showed that she did, though not in the
way Carmen would have showed her love, if she had loved, and if she had a
soul capable of love.

It may have been inferred from Henderson's exhibition of temper that his
case had gone against him. It is true; an injunction had been granted in
the lower court, and public opinion went with the decree, and was in a
great measure satisfied by it. But this fight had really only just begun;
it would go on in the higher courts, with new resources and infinite
devices, which the public would be unable to fathom or follow, until
by-and-by it would come out that a compromise had been made, and the easy
public would not understand that this compromise gave the looters of the
railway substantially all they ever expected to get. The morning after
the granting of the injunction Henderson had been silent and very much
absorbed at breakfast, hardly polite, Margaret thought, and so
inattentive to her remarks that she asked him twice whether they should
accept the Brandon invitation to Christmas. "Christmas! I don't know.
I've got other things to think of than Christmas," he said, scarcely
looking at her, and rising abruptly and going away to his library.

When the postman brought Margaret's mail there was a letter in it from
her aunt, which she opened leisurely after the other notes had been
glanced through, on the principle that a family