But though he was tender of her in his thoughts, he was a hard master that
night: everything went wrong, nothing pleased or contented him, and the
sullen, much-tried servant at last announced that with the morning he
would leave his master to his own devices.

"Go, and be damned to you!" was the savage reply; and the man took him at
his word, decamping, after making a few necessary arrangements, as soon
after breakfast as he could.

"And I have been as good to that fellow the year he has lived with me as I
could," thought Ross Norval as hour after hour he lay alone wanting
everything--water, the papers, a handkerchief. There was nothing he did
not want, and he could reach nothing but those nauseous medicines.
"Service cannot be bought: in very truth, love and patience must be a free
gift. However, now even love and patience seem to have fled from me. I
want my wife--I want her awfully."

Percy, with her sad little heart lying as heavy as a plummet in her
breast, was just as bright and useful and entertaining to her cranky old
friend as if life was a boon instead of a bane to her. You know from her
letter how bitter life was to her; and I think if you have ever known
sorrow and a great disappointment, you will comprehend how it was possible
for her, with the fear of God before her, and a desire to be His faithful
child, to make this match for herself. Anything was better than the dull
stagnation into which she had fallen: she had felt this year, unless some
great change came to her to take her out of this weary groove in which she
was set, she must go melancholy mad. She had laid out a hundred schemes,
all of them, she knew, impracticable; and now, in a strange, providential
way, this chance to change every thought and action of her whole life had