"I don't want to be a brute."

"It's no use my saying I'm sorry," she said.

"_Are_ you?" He leaned forward to put the question.

"We must make the best of it," she said. "Perhaps---- Look here, don't
let's speak of it till after Christmas; let's just go on as we did
before."

So the days wore on. But the situation when Michael lived in torment in
the company of his old wife was simplicity itself compared to his new
life with a wife--young, beautiful, and a stranger, yet in all
essentials his dearest friend. This discomfort grew daily--hourly
branching out into ever fresh embarrassments--new and harassing,
vexatious, half understood, wholly resented.

The wife had her burden to bear also. The laundress had only known the
old wife as "Mrs Wood."

"She thought I was your mother," the wife said when Michael propounded
the difficulty. But the laundress's attitude to the new Mrs Wood had a
sting that was almost punishment enough to the wife, had Michael only
known, for all that she had done amiss.

The hour of departure for the Christmas festivities at Wood Grange came
as a relief from the persistent pinpricks of unexplained emotion which
tormented him. His wife was young and beautiful, yet he was only
conscious of repulsion. He hated her for her trickery. But most he hated
her because she had cheated him of the old wife--the friend, the
_confidante_, who had grown to be so much, and so much the best part, in
his life. For now there was no confidence between the two--no talk, no
reading, no music to brighten the Temple rooms. They lived in an almost
complete silence.

* * * * *

Every window of the Grange shone out with yellow light across the snow.
For once Christmas had been kind and seasonable--a white sheet covered
the world. Holly gleamed against old oak. Priceless silver, saved from
the smelting-pot in Cromwell's hard days, shone above white napery on
the long tables. The tenants' dinner was over, and now was the moment
when, according to the will, Michael Wood's wife must be presented to
the tenants then assembled.

The slender figure in white woollen cloth and white fur, with Christmas
roses at its breast, stood on the dais at the end of the great hall, and
the tenants cheered themselves hoarse at the mere sight of her beautiful
face, her kind eyes.

"It went off very well," Michael said when, the last guest gone, the
last shutter closed, the last servant departed, the two