that he could not find his hearth free.  When he opened the door the two singers went on towards the key-note, raising their eyes and looking at him indeed, but not regarding his entrance as an interruption.  To a man galled with his harness as poor Lydgate was, it is not soothing to see two people warbling at him, as he comes in with the sense that the painful day has still pains in store.  His face, already paler than usual, took on a scowl as he walked across the room and flung himself into a chair.

The singers feeling themselves excused by the fact that they had only three bars to sing, now turned round.

“How are you, Lydgate?” said Will, coming forward to shake hands.

Lydgate took his hand, but did not think it necessary to speak.

“Have you dined, Tertius?  I expected you much earlier,” said Rosamond, who had already seen that her husband was in a “horrible humor.”  She seated herself in her usual place as she spoke.

“I have dined.  I should like some tea, please,” said Lydgate, curtly, still scowling and looking markedly at his legs stretched out before him.

Will was too quick to need more.  “I shall be off,” he said, reaching his hat.

“Tea is coming,” said Rosamond; “pray don’t go.”

“Yes, Lydgate is bored,” said Will, who had more comprehension of Lydgate than Rosamond had, and was not offended by his manner, easily imagining outdoor causes of annoyance.

“There is the more need for you to stay,” said Rosamond, playfully, and in her lightest accent; “he will not speak to me all the evening.”

“Yes, Rosamond, I shall,” said Lydgate, in his strong baritone.  “I have some serious business to speak to you about.”

No introduction of the business could have been less like that which Lydgate had intended; but her indifferent manner had been too provoking.

“There! you see,” said Will.  “I’m going to the meeting about the Mechanics’ Institute.  Good-by;” and he went quickly out of the room.

Rosamond did not look at her husband, but presently rose and took her place before the tea-tray.  She was thinking that she had never seen him so disagreeable.  Lydgate turned his dark eyes on her and watched her as she delicately handled the tea-service with her taper fingers, and looked at the objects immediately before her with no curve in her face disturbed, and yet with an ineffable protest in her air against all people with unpleasant manners.  For the moment he lost the sense of his wound in a sudden speculation about this new form of feminine impassibility revealing itself in the sylph-like frame which he had once interpreted as the sign of a ready intelligent sensitiveness.  His mind glancing back to Laure while he looked at Rosamond, he said inwardly, “Would she kill me because I wearied her?” and then, “It is the way with all women.”  But this power of generalizing which gives men so much the superiority