himself in these ways particularly pure.  He loved money and position for their own sakes and hated himself for loving them.  He would have liked to have been strong enough to despise these things as Lucia had always despised them.  But he did not desire that she should go on despising them, any more than he desired that her indifference should survive the marriage ceremony.  He pictured with satisfaction her gradual yielding to the modest luxury he had to offer her, just as he pictured the exquisite delaying dawn of her wifely ardour.

The truth was he had lived too long with Edith.  The instincts of his nature cried out (as far as anything so well-regulated could be said to cry out) in the most refined of accents for a wife, for children and a home.  He had his dreams of the holy faithful spouse, a spouse with great dog-like eyes and tender breast, fit pillow for the head of a headachy, literary man.  Lucia had dog-like eyes, and of her tenderness he had never had a doubt.  He had never forgotten that hot June day, the year before he left Oxford, when he lay in the hammock in the green garden and Lucia ministered to him.  Before that there was a blessed Long Vacation when he had over-read himself into a nervous breakdown, and Lucia had soothed his headaches with the touch of her gentle hands.  For the sake of that touch he would then have borne the worst headache man ever had.

And now it seemed that it was Lucia that was always having headaches.  He had, in fact, begun to entertain the very gravest anxiety about her health.  Her face and figure had grown thin; they were becoming less and less like the face and figure of the ideal spouse.  Poor Lucia’s arms offered no reliable support for a tired man.

To his annoyance Jewdwine found that he had to breakfast alone with his hostess, because of Lucia’s headache.

“Lucia doesn’t seem very strong,” he said to Kitty, sternly, as if it had been Kitty’s fault.  “Don’t you see it?”

“I have seen it for some considerable time.”

“She wants rousing.”

And Jewdwine, who was himself feeling the need of exercise, roused her by taking her for a walk up Harcombe Hill.  Half-way up she turned a white face to him, smiling sweetly, sat down on the hillside, and bent her head upon her knees.  He sat beside her and waited for her recovery with punctilious patience.  His face wore an expression of agonized concern.  But she could see that the concern was not there altogether on her account.

“Don’t be frightened, Horace, you won’t have to carry me home.”

He helped her to her feet, not ungently, and was very considerate in accommodating his pace to hers, and in reassuring her when she apologized for having spoilt his morning.  And then it was that she thought of Keith Rickman, of his gentleness and his innumerable acts of kindness and of care; and she said to herself, “He would not be impatient with me if I were ill.”