“Well, here we are at home.  We have walked a mile, and yet it seems but a furlong.  If I were not so disagreeable as you say, we would take another turn about the Common.”

“Sleep will do you more good, my friend; and I think I’ll go home.  I haven’t smoked since dinner.  Good night!”

Greenleaf went to his room, but not at once to sleep; his nerves were still too tremulous.  With the picture of Alice before him, he sat for hours in a dreamy reverie; and when at last he went to bed, he placed the miniature under his pillow.

CHAPTER VIII.

A YOUNG FINANCIER AT HOME.

John Fletcher lived in a small, but neat house at the South End.  Slender and youthful as he looked, he was not a bachelor, but had a pretty, fragile-looking wife, to whom he was married when only nineteen years of age.  Such a union could have been brought about only by what the world calls an indiscretion, or from an unreflecting, hasty impulse.  Girl as Mrs. Fletcher seemed to be, she was not without prudence as a housekeeper; and as far as she could command her inconstant temper, she made home attractive to her husband.  But neither of them had the weight of character to act as a counterpoise to the vacillation of the other.  It was not a sun and a planet, the one wheeling about the other, nor yet were they double stars, revolving about a centre common to both; their movements were like nothing so much as the freaks of a couple of pith-balls electrically excited, at one time drawn furiously together, and then capriciously repelling each other.  Their loves, caresses, spats, quarrels, poutings, and reconciliations were as uncertain as the vagaries of the weather, as little guided by sense or reason as the passions of early childhood.  On one subject they agreed at all times, and that was to pet and spoil most thoroughly their infant daughter, a puny, weak-voiced, slender-limbed, curly-haired child, with the least possible chance of living to the age of womanhood.

Fletcher was confidential clerk to the great banking-house of Foggarty, Danforth, and Dot.  The senior partner rarely took any active part in business, but left it to the management of Danforth and Dot.  Danforth had the active brain to plan, Dot the careful, cool faculty to execute.  Fletcher had a good salary,—­so large that he could always reserve a small margin for “outside operations,” by which in one way or another he generally contrived to lose.

The god he worshipped was Chance; by which I do not refer at all to any theory of the creation of matter, but to the course and order of human affairs.  His drawers were full of old lottery-schemes; he did not long buy tickets, because he was too shrewd; but he made endless calculations upon the probability of drawing prizes,—­provided the tickets were really all sold, and the wheel fairly managed.  A dice-box was always at hand upon the mantel.