ich was a half-holiday. At night,
when the work was altogether over, he showed the letter to his wife, and
told her what he had decided.

"Couldn't you have gone without me?" she asked.

"How can I do that," he said, "when before this time to-morrow I shall
have told everything to Dr. Wortle? After that, he would not let me go.
He would do no more than his duty in telling me that if I proposed to go
he must make it all known to Lord Bracy. But this is a trifle. I am at
the present moment altogether in the dark as to what I shall do with
myself when to-morrow evening comes. I cannot guess, because it is so
hard to know what are the feelings in the breast of another man. It may
so well be that he should refuse me permission to go to my desk in the
school again."

"Will he be hard like that?"

"I can hardly tell myself whether it would be hard. I hardly know what I
should feel it my duty to do in such a position myself. I have deceived
him."

"No!" she exclaimed.

"Yes; I have deceived him. Coming to him as I did, I gave him to
understand that there was nothing wrong;--nothing to which special
objection could be made in my position."

"Then we are deceiving all the world in calling ourselves man and wife."

"Certainly we are; but to that we had made up our mind! We are not
injuring all the world. No doubt it is a lie,--but there are
circumstances in which a lie can hardly be a sin. I would have been the
last to say so before all this had come upon me, but I feel it to be so
now. It is a lie to say that you are my wife."

"Is it? Is it?"

"Is it not? And yet I would rather cut my tongue out than say otherwise.
To give you my name is a lie,--but what should I think of myself were I to
allow you to use any other? What would you have thought if I had asked
you to go away and leave me when that bad hour came upon us?"

"I would have borne it."

"I could not have borne it. There are worse things than a lie. I have
found, since this came upon us, that it may be well to choose one sin in
order that another may be shunned. To cherish you, to comfort you, to
make the storm less sharp to you,--that has already been my duty as well
as my pleasure. To do the same to me is your duty."

"And my pleasure; and my pleasure,--my only pleasure."

"We must cling to each other, let the world call us what names it may.
But there may come a time in which one is called on to do a special act of
justice to othe