“Hush! hush, Irene!” said her friend, in a tone of deprecation.  “The lightest sense of wrong gains undue magnitude the moment we begin to complain.  We see almost anything to be of greater importance when from the obscurity of thought we bring it out into the daylight of speech.”

“It will be just as I say, and saying it will not make it any more so,” was Irene’s almost sullen response to this.  “I have my own ideas of things and my own individuality, and neither of these do I mean to abandon.  If Hartley hasn’t the good sense to let me have my own way in what concerns myself, I will take my own way.  As to the troubles that may come afterward, I do not give them any weight in the argument.  I would die a martyr’s deaths rather than become the passive creature of another.”

“My dear friend, why will you talk so?” Rose spoke in a tone of grief.

“Simply because I am in earnest.  From the hour of our marriage I have seen a disposition on the part of my husband to assume control—­to make his will the general law of our actions.  It has not exhibited itself in things of moment, but in trifles, showing that the spirit was there.  I say this to you, Rose, because we have been like sisters, and I can tell you of my inmost thoughts.  There is a cloud already in the sky, and it threatens an approaching storm.”

“Oh, my friend, why are you so blind, so weak, so self-deceived?  You are putting forth your hands to drag down the temple of happiness.  If it fall, it will crush you beneath a mass of ruins; and not you only, but the one you have so lately pledged yourself before God and his angels to love.”

“And I do love him as deeply as ever man was loved.  Oh that he knew my heart!  He would not then shatter his image there.  He would not trifle with a spirit formed for intense, yielding, passionate love, but rigid as steel and cold as ice when its freedom is touched.  He should have known me better before linking his fate with mine.”

One of her darker moods had come upon Irene, and she was beating about in the blind obscurity of passion.  As she began to give utterance to complaining thoughts, new thoughts formed themselves, and what was only vague feelings grew into ideas of wrong; and these, when once spoken, assumed a magnitude unimagined before.  In vain did her friend strive with her.  Argument, remonstrance, persuasion, only seemed to bring greater obscurity and to excite a more bitter feeling in her mind.  And so, despairing of any good result, Rose withdrew, and left her with her own unhappy thoughts.

Not long after Miss Carman retired, Emerson came in.  At the sound of his approaching footsteps, Irene had, with a strong effort, composed herself and swept back the deeper shadows from her face.

“Not ready yet?” he said, in a pleasant, half-chiding way.  “The carriages will be at the door in ten minutes.”

“I am not going to ride out,” returned Irene, in a quiet, seemingly indifferent tone of voice.  Hartley mistook her manner for sport, and answered pleasantly—­