that I had been married?"

We started. "Married? No. How was it, and when?"

"It is no matter now, my girls. Some time I may tell you about it. I
should not have spoken of it now, but that I know my little Alice
would not believe a word I am going to tell her, if she thought she
was listening to an old bachelor's croakings. Now I can speak with
authority. You think you could not live without Herbert's love? My
dear, we can live without a great many things that we fancy
indispensable. Nor is it so very easy to die. There comes many a time
in life when it would seem quite according to the fitness of things,
just the proper ending to the romance, to lie down and die; but,
unfortunately, or rather fortunately, dying is a thing that we cannot
do so just in the nick of time; and indeed"--and Uncle John's face
assumed its strange smile, which seemed to take you, as it were,
suddenly behind the scenes, to show you the wrong side of the
tapestry,--"and indeed," he continued, "when I look back on the times
in my life that I should have died, when it was fitting and proper to
die, when I felt that dying would be such a trump card to play, if
only I could manage it, I must say that I am glad now that it was
beyond my power to arrange things according to the melodramatic
rules. As it is, I am alive now. I shake my fist at all the ghosts of
my departed tragedies and say, 'I am worth two of you. I am alive. I
have all the chances of the future in my favor.'"

Here he caught sight of Alice's wide-opened eyes, and his smile
changed into his own genial laugh, as he kissed her forehead and went
on.