“Very well, then, Isabel, I’ll leave you at the hotel.”

In a moment it had come, the first serious dispute of their wedded life.  It had come as all such calamities come, from nothing, and it was on them in full disaster ere they knew.  Such a very little while ago, there in the convent garden, their lives had been drawn closer in sympathy than ever before; and now that blessed time seemed ages since, and they were further asunder than those who have never been friends.  “I thought,” bitterly mused Isabel, “that he would have done anything for me.”  “Who could have dreamed that a woman of her sense would be so unreasonable,” he wondered.  Both had tempers, as I know my dearest reader has (if a lady), and neither would yield; and so, presently, they could hardly tell how, for they were aghast at it all, Isabel was alone in her room amidst the ruins of her life, and Basil alone in the one-horse carriage, trying to drive away from the wreck of his happiness.  All was over; the dream was past; the charm was broken.  The sweetness of their love was turned to gall; whatever had pleased them in their loving moods was loathsome now, and the things they had praised a moment before were hateful.  In that baleful light, which seemed to dwell upon all they ever said or did in mutual enjoyment, how poor and stupid and empty looked their wedding-journey!  Basil spent five minutes in arraigning his wife and convicting her of every folly and fault.  His soul was in a whirl,

     “For to be wroth with one we love
     Doth work like madness in the brain.”

In the midst of his bitter and furious upbraidings he found himself suddenly become her ardent advocate, and ready to denounce her judge as a heartless monster.  “On our wedding journey, too!  Good heavens, what an incredible brute I am!” Then he said, “What an ass I am!” And the pathos of the case having yielded to its absurdity, he was helpless.  In five minutes more he was at Isabel’s side, the one-horse carriage driver dismissed with a handsome pour-boire, and a pair of lusty bays with a glittering barouche waiting at the door below.  He swiftly accounted for his presence, which she seemed to find the most natural thing that could be, and she met his surrender with the openness of a heart that forgives but does not forget, if indeed the most gracious art is the only one unknown to the sex.

She rose with a smile from the ruins of her life, amidst which she had heart-brokenly sat down with all her things on.  “I knew you’d come back,” she said.

“So did I,” he answered.  “I am much too good and noble to sacrifice my preference to my duty.”

“I didn’t care particularly for the two horses, Basil,” she said, as they descended to the barouche.  “It was your refusing them that hurt me.”

“And I didn’t want the one-horse carriage.  It was your insisting so that provoked me.”

“Do you think people ever quarreled before on a wedding journey?” asked Isabel as they drove gayly out of the city.