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He turned and walked up the hill

"I'm sorry you didn't find Ellen--I should have liked to see her again," May said as they drove hoh the dusk "But perhaps she wouldn't have cared--she seeed?" echoed her husband in a colourless voice, his eyes fixed on the ponies' twitching ears

"So indifferent to her friends, Iher time with such queer people Fancy how hideously uncomfortable she must be at the Blenkers'! She says she does it to keep cousin Medora out ofdreadful people But I sometimes think we've always bored her"

Archer e of hardness that he had never before noticed in her frank fresh voice: "After all, I wonder if she wouldn't be happier with her husband"

He burst into a laugh "Sancta simplicitas!" he exclaimed; and as she turned a puzzled frown on hi before"

"Cruel?"

"Well--watching the contortions of the daels; but I believe even they don't think people happier in hell"

"It's a pity she ever married abroad then," said May, in the placid tone hich her ently relegated to the category of unreasonable husbands

They drove down Bellevue Avenue and turned in between the chaate-posts surmounted by cast-iron lahts were already shining through its s, and Archer, as the carriage stopped, caught a glimpse of his father-in-law, exactly as he had pictured hi the pained expression that he had long since found to beman, as he followed his wife into the hall, was conscious of a curious reversal ofabout the luxury of the Welland house and the density of the Welland ated with minute observances and exactions, that always stole into his system like a narcotic The heavy carpets, the watchful servants, the perpetually re tick of disciplined clocks, the perpetually renewed stack of cards and invitations on the hall table, the whole chain of tyrannical trifles binding one hour to the next, and each member of the household to all the others, made any less systematised and affluent existence seem unreal and precarious But noas the Welland house, and the life he was expected to lead in it, that had become unreal and irrelevant, and the brief scene on the shore, when he had stood irresolute, halfway down the bank, was as close to him as the blood in his veins