London was shrouded, parliament had risen, and the great houses were closed.  Day after day we issued forth from a musty and highly respectable hotel near Piccadilly to a gloomy Tower, a soggy Hampton Court or a mournful British Museum.  Our native longing for luxury—­or rather my native longing—­impelled me to abandon Smith’s Hotel for a huge hostelry where our suite overlooked the Thames, where we ran across a man I had known slightly at Harvard, and other Americans with whom we made excursions and dined and went to the theatre.  Maude liked these persons; I did not find them especially congenial.  My life-long habit of unwillingness to accept what life sent in its ordinary course was asserting itself; but Maude took her friends as she found them, and I was secretly annoyed by her lack of discrimination.  In addition to this, the sense of having been pulled up by the roots grew upon me.

“Suppose,” Maude surprised me by suggesting one morning as we sat at breakfast watching the river craft flit like phantoms through the yellow-green fog—­“suppose we don’t go to France, after all, Hugh?”

“Not go to France!” I exclaimed.  “Are you tired of the trip?”

“Oh, Hugh!” Her voice caught.  “I could go on, always, if you were content.”

“And—­what makes you think that I’m not content?”

Her smile had in it just a touch of wistfulness.

“I understand you, Hugh, better than you think.  You want to get back to your work, and—­and I should be happier.  I’m not so silly and so ignorant as to think that I can satisfy you always.  And I’d like to get settled at home,—­I really should.”

There surged up within me a feeling of relief.  I seized her hand as it lay on the table.

“We’ll come abroad another time, and go to France,” I said.  “Maude, you’re splendid!”

She shook her head.

“Oh, no, I’m not.”

“You do satisfy me,” I insisted.  “It isn’t that at all.  But I think, perhaps, it would be wiser to go back.  It’s rather a crucial time with me, now that Mr. Watling’s in Washington.  I’ve just arrived at a position where I shall be able to make a good deal of money, and later on—­”

“It isn’t the money, Hugh,” she cried, with a vehemence which struck me as a little odd.  “I sometimes think we’d be a great deal happier without—­without all you are going to make.”

I laughed.

“Well, I haven’t made it yet.”

She possessed the frugality of the Hutchinses.  And some times my lavishness had frightened her, as when we had taken the suite of rooms we now occupied.

“Are you sure you can afford them, Hugh?” she had asked when we first surveyed them.

I began married life, and carried it on without giving her any conception of the state of my finances.  She had an allowance from the first.