“Will you be a little glad to see me, Gracie?  Why not?  We are both alone now.  Let us take hands, and walk the same path together.  Shall we?

“Yours till death, and after,

“WALTER SYDENHAM.”

Would she?  To say the truth, the question as asked now had a very different air from the question as asked years before, when, full of life and hope and enthusiasm, she had devoted herself to making an ideal home for her father and brother.  What other sympathy or communion, she had asked herself then, should she ever need than these friends, so very dear:  and, if she needed more, there, in the future, was John’s ideal wife, who, somehow, always came before her in the likeness of Rose Ferguson, and John’s ideal children, whom she was sure she should love and pet as if they were her own.

And now here she was, in a house all by herself, coming down to her meals, one after another, without the excitement of a cheerful face opposite to her, and with all possibility of confidential intercourse with her brother entirely cut off.  Lillie, in this matter, acted, with much grace and spirit, the part of the dog in the manger; and, while she resolutely refused to enter into any of John’s literary or intellectual tastes, seemed to consider her wifely rights infringed upon by any other woman who would.  She would absolutely refuse to go up with her husband and spend an evening with Grace, alleging it was “pokey and stupid,” and that they always got talking about things that she didn’t care any thing about.  If, then, John went without her to spend the evening, he was sure to be received, on his return, with a dead and gloomy silence, more fearful, sometimes, than the most violent of objurgations.  That look of patient, heart-broken woe, those long-drawn sighs, were a reception that he dreaded, to say the truth, a great deal more than a direct attack, or any fault-finding to which he could have replied; and so, on the whole, John made up his mind that the best thing he could do was to stay at home and rock the cradle of this fretful baby, whose wisdom-teeth were so hard to cut, and so long in coming.  It was a pretty baby; and when made the sole and undivided object of attention, when every thing possible was done for it by everybody in the house, condescended often to be very graceful and winning and playful, and had numberless charming little ways and tricks.  The difference between Lillie in good humor and Lillie in bad humor was a thing which John soon learned to appreciate as one of the most powerful forces in his life.  If you knew, my dear reader, that by pursuing a certain course you could bring upon yourself a drizzling, dreary, north-east rain-storm, and by taking heed to your ways you could secure sunshine, flowers, and bird-singing, you would be very careful, after a while, to keep about you the right atmospheric temperature; and, if going to see the very best friend you had on earth was sure to bring on a fit of rheumatism or tooth-ache, you