For all our sakes you must try to get over it." The irony of it all--that she should be consoling her husband's father for her husband's desertion of her--did not appear to her until long afterwards.

At the time she thought only that she--that somebody--must make the tragedy easier for him to bear.
"Come and sit down, Archibald," said Mrs.Fowler pleadingly.

"Let me give you a glass of sherry and a biscuit; you are too tired to talk." There was the old devotion in her manner, but there was also a new deference.

For the first time in thirty years of marriage he had shown his strength to her, not his gentleness; for the first time he had opposed his will to hers in the cause of justice, and he had conquered her.

In spite of her anguish, something of the romantic expectancy of her first love had returned to her heart and it showed in her softened voice, in her timid caresses, in her wistful eyes, which held a pathetic and startled brightness.