k from their brilliant fortnight on the south coast, and
were standing together in the atrocious bow-window of their little sitting
room looking out on the street. A thick gray rain was falling, and a
dust-cart was in sight.

"Aggie," he said, "I'm afraid you'll miss the country."

She said nothing; she was lost in thought.

"It looks rather a brute of a place, doesn't it? But it won't be so bad
when the rain clears off. And you know, dear, there are the museums and
picture-galleries in town, and there'll be the concerts, and lectures on
all sorts of interesting subjects, two or three times a week. Then there's
our Debating Society at Hampstead--just a few of us who meet together to
discuss big questions. Every month it meets, and you'll get to know all
the intellectual people--"

Aggie nodded her head at each exciting item of the programme as he reeled
it off. His heart smote him; he felt that he hadn't prepared her properly
for Camden Town. He thought she was mourning the first perishing of her
illusions.

His voice fell, humbly. "And I really think, in time, you know, you won't
find it quite so bad."

She turned on him the face of one risen rosy from the embraces of her
dream. She put a hand on each of his shoulders, and looked at him with
shining eyes.

"Oh, Arthur, _dear_, it's all too beautiful. I couldn't say anything,
because I was so happy. Come, and let's look at everything all over
again."

And they went, and looked at everything all over again, reviving the
delight that had gone to the furnishing of that innocent interior. She
cried out with joy over the cheap art serges, the brown-paper backgrounds,
the blue-and-gray drugget, the oak chairs with their rush bottoms, the
Borne-Jones photogravures, the "Hope" and the "Love Leading Life," and the
"Love Triumphant." Their home would be the home of a material poverty, but
to Aggie's mind it was also a shrine whose austere beauty sheltered the
priceless spiritual ideal.

Their wedded ardor flamed when he showed her for the tenth time his
wonderful contrivance for multiplying bookshelves, as their treasures
accumulated year by year. They spoke with confidence of a day when the
shelves would reach from floor to ceiling, to meet the inevitable
expansion of the intellectual life.

They went out that very evening to a lecture on "Appearance and Reality,"
an inspiring lecture. They lived in it again (sitting over their cocoa in
the tiny dining-room), each k