“And I have been as good to that fellow the year he has lived with me as I could,” thought Ross Norval as hour after hour he lay alone wanting everything—­water, the papers, a handkerchief.  There was nothing he did not want, and he could reach nothing but those nauseous medicines.  “Service cannot be bought:  in very truth, love and patience must be a free gift.  However, now even love and patience seem to have fled from me.  I want my wife—­I want her awfully.”

Percy, with her sad little heart lying as heavy as a plummet in her breast, was just as bright and useful and entertaining to her cranky old friend as if life was a boon instead of a bane to her.  You know from her letter how bitter life was to her; and I think if you have ever known sorrow and a great disappointment, you will comprehend how it was possible for her, with the fear of God before her, and a desire to be His faithful child, to make this match for herself.  Anything was better than the dull stagnation into which she had fallen:  she had felt this year, unless some great change came to her to take her out of this weary groove in which she was set, she must go melancholy mad.  She had laid out a hundred schemes, all of them, she knew, impracticable; and now, in a strange, providential way, this chance to change every thought and action of her whole life had come to her.  Do you wonder much she accepted it?  I think it was not strange.

That night after his offer (the night she had asked for in which to decide, although she said to herself, with a bitter little shrug as she made the request, “A woman who hesitates is lost"), as she lay awake pondering the whole matter, she thought:  “It can’t be worse than it is, and it won’t be very long either way, I think.  I can be faithful to him, make and mend, dig and delve, if needs be, for his benefit, in return for the honor he does me in giving me his name and protection.  I shall expect nothing, literally nothing, from him that wives usually demand.  I, who have borne for years with the caprice of school-girls, can surely bear the humors of one man, especially when his name shields me from other sorts of ills.  I have rather plumed myself these last few months upon having learned the depth of meaning and force of truth there is in that expression from Sartor Resartus I used to think so wicked:  ’Say to happiness, I can do without you—­in self-renunciation life begins,’ I can try it now.  I need not be a spaniel or fawn upon my lord, and yet I can obey and honor, if he will let me, this man to whom I shall vow myself for life.  For life!  Can I endure it all the years I may have to live an unloved wife—­so near and yet so far from him to whom I am bound?  Will it not be a death in life?  Will it be better than this dead, cold monotony I now bear?  Better or worse?  Ah, there’s the rub!  I can never hope to win his faithful, abiding love.  Even did use make me acceptable to him, I could not trust its continuance.  And