which she was
unable to conceal. "But I feel dull, and cannot help it."

"You should have gone with me to laugh with Matthews. He would have
shaken all these cobwebs from your brain. Come! it is not yet too
late."

But the rebel spirit was in her heart; and to have acceded to he
husband's wishes would have been to submit herself to control.

"You must excuse me," she replied. "I feel as if home were the
better place for me to-night."

An impatient answer was on her tongue; but she checked its
utterance, and spoke from a better spirit.

Not even as a lover had Hartley shown more considerate tenderness
than marked all his conduct toward Irene this evening. His mind was
in a clear-seeing region, and his feelings tranquil. The sphere of
her antagonism failed to reach him. He did not understand the
meaning of her opposition to his wishes, and so pride, self-love and
self-will remained quiescent. How peacefully unconscious was he of
the fact that his feet were standing over a mine, and that a single
spark of passion struck from him would have sprung that mine in
fierce explosion! He read to Irene from a volume which he knew to be
a favorite; talked to her about Ivy Cliff and her father; suggested
an early visit to the pleasant old river home; and thus charmed away
the evil spirits which had found a lodgment in her bosom.

But how different it might have been!

CHAPTER XIII.

THE REFORMERS.

_SOCIAL_ theories that favor our passions, peculiarities, defects of
character or weaknesses are readily adopted, and, with minds of an
ardent temper, often become hobbies. There is a class of persons who
are never content with riding their own hobbies; they must have
others mount with them. All the world is going wrong because it
moves past them--trotting, pacing or galloping, as it may be, upon
its own hobbies. And so they try to arrest this movement or that,
or, gathering a company of aimless people, they galvanize them with
their own wild purposes, and start them forth into the world on
Quixotic errands.

These persons are never content to wait for the slow changes that
are included in all orderly developments. Because a thing seems
right to them in the abstract, it must be done now. They cannot wait
for old things to pass away, as preliminary to the inauguration of
what is new.

"If I had the power," we have heard one of this class say, "evil and
sorrow and pain should cease from the earth in a moment." And in