matrimony, and forth goes the middle-aged Mr. Wakefield, almost resolved to perplex his good lady by a whole week’s absence.  After the door has closed behind him, she perceives it thrust partly open and a vision of her husband’s face through the aperture, smiling on her and gone in a moment.  For the time this little incident is dismissed without a thought, but long afterward, when she has been more years a widow than a wife, that smile recurs and flickers across all her reminiscences of Wakefield’s visage.  In her many musings she surrounds the original smile with a multitude of fantasies which make it strange and awful; as, for instance, if she imagines him in a coffin, that parting look is frozen on his pale features; or if she dreams of him in heaven, still his blessed spirit wears a quiet and crafty smile.  Yet for its sake, when all others have given him up for dead, she sometimes doubts whether she is a widow.

But our business is with the husband.  We must hurry after him along the street ere he lose his individuality and melt into the great mass of London life.  It would be vain searching for him there.  Let us follow close at his heels, therefore, until, after several superfluous turns and doublings, we find him comfortably established by the fireside of a small apartment previously bespoken.  He is in the next street to his own and at his journey’s end.  He can scarcely trust his good-fortune in having got thither unperceived, recollecting that at one time he was delayed by the throng in the very focus of a lighted lantern, and again there were footsteps that seemed to tread behind his own, distinct from the multitudinous tramp around him, and anon he heard a voice shouting afar and fancied that it called his name.  Doubtless a dozen busybodies had been watching him and told his wife the whole affair.

Poor Wakefield! little knowest thou thine own insignificance in this great world.  No mortal eye but mine has traced thee.  Go quietly to thy bed, foolish man, and on the morrow, if thou wilt be wise, get thee home to good Mrs. Wakefield and tell her the truth.  Remove not thyself even for a little week from thy place in her chaste bosom.  Were she for a single moment to deem thee dead or lost or lastingly divided from her, thou wouldst be woefully conscious of a change in thy true wife for ever after.  It is perilous to make a chasm in human affections—­not that they gape so long and wide, but so quickly close again.

Almost repenting of his frolic, or whatever it may be termed, Wakefield lies down betimes, and, starting from his first nap, spreads forth his arms into the wide and solitary waste of the unaccustomed bed, “No,” thinks he, gathering the bedclothes about him; “I will not sleep alone another night.”  In the morning he rises earlier than usual and sets himself to consider what he really means to do.  Such are his loose and rambling modes of thought that he has taken this very singular step with the consciousness