“Come and sit down, Archibald,” said Mrs. Fowler pleadingly.  “Let me give you a glass of sherry and a biscuit; you are too tired to talk.”

There was the old devotion in her manner, but there was also a new deference.  For the first time in thirty years of marriage he had shown his strength to her, not his gentleness; for the first time he had opposed his will to hers in the cause of justice, and he had conquered her.  In spite of her anguish, something of the romantic expectancy of her first love had returned to her heart and it showed in her softened voice, in her timid caresses, in her wistful eyes, which held a pathetic and startled brightness.  He had triumphed in honour; and if her defeat had not involved George, she could almost have gloried in the completeness of her surrender.

He sat down with the air of a man who is not entirely awake to his surroundings; and his wife, after ordering the sherry, hovered over him with the touching solicitude of one who is living for the moment in the shadow of memory.  While he sipped the wine, he waited until Burrows’ footsteps had passed down the staircase, and then said with his usual quietness: 

“There is something else, Evelyn, that I kept back.  I couldn’t tell you while you were so worried about George, but there is something else—­”

She caught the words from him eagerly, with a gesture almost of relief.

“You mean it has come at last.  I suspected it, and, oh, Archibald, I don’t care—­I don’t care!”

“There were several failures to-day in Wall Street, and—­” He broke off as if he were too tired to go on, and added slowly after a moment:  “I am too old to begin again.  I’d like to go back home—­to go back to the South for my old age.  Yes, I’m old.”

But his wife was on her knees beside him, with her arms about his neck and her face hidden on his breast.  “I don’t care, I never cared,” she said in a voice that was almost exultant.  “We can be happy on so little—­happier than we’ve ever been in our lives—­just you and I to grow old together.  We can go home to Virginia—­to some small place and be happy.  Happiness costs so little.”

Slipping away, Gabriella went into the hail, and passing her room, noiselessly pushed open the door of the nursery, where the children were sleeping.  A night lamp was burning in one corner under a dark shade, and the nurse’s knitting, a pile of white yarn, was lying on the table in the circle of green light, which was as soft as the glimmer of a glow-worm in a thicket.  In their two little beds, separated by a strip of white rug, the children were sleeping quietly, with a wonderful freshness, like the dew of innocence, on their faces.  Frances lay on her back, very straight and prim even in sleep, with the sheet folded neatly under her dimpled chin, her hands clasped on her breast, and her golden curls spread in perfect order over the lace-trimmed pillow.  Her miniature features, framed in the dim gold of