After six weeks had passed, my wife paid a visit to Margaret.  Nothing could exceed the affectionate cordiality of her welcome.  Margaret was overjoyed to see her, to show the house, to have her know her husband better, to take her into her new life.  She was hardly yet over the naive surprises of her lovely surroundings.  Or if it is too mach to say that her surprise had lasted six weeks—­for it is marvelous how soon women adapt themselves to new conditions if they are agreeable—­she was in a glow of wonder at her husband’s goodness, at his love, which had procured all this happiness for her.

“You have no idea,” she said, “how thoughtful he is about everything—­and he makes so little of it all.  I am to thank you, he tells me always, for whatever pleases my taste in the house, and indeed I think I should have known you had been here if he had not told me.  There are so many little touches that remind me of home.  I am glad of that, for it is the more likely to make you feel that it is your home also.”

She clung to this idea in the whirl of the new life.  In the first days she dwelt much on this theme; indeed it was hardly second in her talk to her worship—­I can call it nothing less—­of her husband.  She liked to talk of Brandon and the dear life there and the dearer friends—­this much talk about it showed that it was another life, already of the past, and beginning to be distant in the mind.  My wife had a feeling that Margaret, thus early, was conscious of a drift, of a widening space, and was making an effort to pull the two parts of her life together, that there should be no break, as one carried away to sea by a resistless tide grasps the straining rope that still maintains his slender connection with the shore.

But it was all so different:  the luxurious house, the carriage at call, the box at the opera, the social duties inevitable with her own acquaintances and the friends of her husband.  She spoke of this in moments of confidence, and when she was tired, with a consciousness that it was a different life, but in no tone of regret, and I fancy that the French blood in her veins, which had so long run decorously in Puritan channels, leaped at its return into new gayety.  Years ago Margaret had thought that she might some time be a missionary, at least that she should like to devote her life to useful labors among the poor and the unfortunate.  If conscience ever reminded her of this, conscience was quieted by the suggestion that now she was in a position to be more liberal than she ever expected to be; that is, to give everything except the essential thing—­herself.  Henderson liked a gay house, brightness, dinners, entertainment, and that his wife should be seen and admired.  Proof of his love she found in all this, and she entered into it with spirit, and an enjoyment increased by the thought that she was lightening the burden of his business, which she could see pressed more and more.  Not that Henderson made any account