“Harry,” my wife said, with a shade of solemnity, “I am almost ashamed of you for the first time.  And I will punish you by telling you the truth.  Do you think I had nothing of that sort to get over when I began to find that I was thinking a little more about you than was quite convenient under the circumstances?  Your manners, dear Harry, though irreproachable, just had not the tone that I had been accustomed to.  There was a diffidence about you also that did not at first advance you in my regard.”

“Yes, yes,” I answered, a little piqued, “I dare say.  I have no doubt you thought me a boor.”

“Dear Harry!”

“I beg your pardon, wifie.  I know you didn’t.  But it is quite bad enough to have brought you down to my level, without sinking you still lower.”

“Now there you are wrong, Harry.  And that is what I want to show you.  I found that my love to you would not be satisfied with making an exception in your favour.  I must see what force there really was in the notions I had been bred in.”

“Ah!” I said.  “I see.  You looked for a principle in what you had thought was an exception.”

“Yes,” returned my wife; “and I soon found one.  And the next step was to throw away all false judgment in regard to such things.  And so I can see more clearly than you into the right of the matter.—­Would you hesitate a moment between Tom Weir and the dissolute son of an earl, Harry?”

“You know I would not.”

“Well, just carry out the considerations that suggests, and you will find that where there is everything personally noble, pure, simple, and good, the lowliness of a man’s birth is but an added honour to him; for it shows that his nobility is altogether from within him, and therefore is his own.  It cannot then have been put on him by education or imitation, as many men’s manners are, who wear their good breeding like their fine clothes, or as the Pharisee his prayers, to be seen of men.”

“But his sister?”

“Harry, Harry!  You were preaching last Sunday about the way God thinks of things.  And you said that was the only true way of thinking about them.  Would the Mary that poured the ointment on Jesus’s head have refused to marry a good man because he was the brother of that Mary who poured it on His feet?  Have you thought what God would think of Tom for a husband to Martha?”

I did not answer, for conscience had begun to speak.  When I lifted my eyes from the ground, thinking Ethelwyn stood beside me, she was gone.  I felt as if she were dead, to punish me for my pride.  But still I could not get over it, though I was ashamed to follow and find her.  I went and got my hat instead, and strolled out.