instead of your own, which you have had a year and a half. Ah!"
sighing, "if you had only spent more money on your wedding clothes!"

"How could I?" said Christian, and stopped, seeing Dr. Grey enter.
This was the one point on which she had resisted him. She could not
accept her trousseau from her husband's generosity. It had been the last
struggle of that fierce, poverty-nurtured independence, which nothing
short of perfect love could have extinguished into happy humility, and
she had held to her point resolute and hard; so much so, that when, with
a quiet dignity peculiarly his own, Dr. Grey had yielded, she had
afterward almost felt ashamed. And even now a slight blush came in
her cheek when she heard him say cheerfully,

"Do not trouble her, Mrs. Ferguson, about her shawl. You know I have
taken her--that is, we have taken one another 'for better, for worse,' and
it is little matter what sort of clothes she wears."

Christian, as she passed him, gave her husband a grateful look.
Grateful, alas! Love does not understand, or even recognize, gratitude.

But when the door closed after her, Dr. Grey's eyes rested on it like
those of one who misses a light.

He sat down covering his mouth--his firmly-set but excessively
sensitive month with his hand, an attitude which was one of his
peculiarities; for he had many, which the world excused because of his
learning, and his friends--well, because of himself.

If ever there was a man who without the slightest obtrusiveness, or self-
assertion of any kind, had unlimited influence over those about him, it