“About Agatha Wylie.”

“Oh, pardon me, Hetty; I certainly did not begin to quarrel about her.  I am very fond of her—­more so, it appears, than she is of me.  One moment, Hetty, before you recommence your reproaches.  Why do you dislike my saying pretty things to Agatha?”

Henrietta hesitated, and said:  “Because you have no right to.  It shows how little you care for me.”

“It has nothing to do with you.  It only shows how much I care for her.”

“I will not stay here to be insulted,” said Hetty, her distress returning.  “I will go home.”

“Not to-night; there is no train.”

“I will walk.”

“It is too far.”

“I don’t care.  I will not stay here, though I die of cold by the roadside.”

“My cherished one, I have been annoying you purposely because you show by your anger that you have not ceased to care for me.  I am in the wrong, as I usually am, and it is all my fault.  Agatha knows nothing about our marriage.”

“I do not blame you so much,” said Henrietta, suffering him to place her head on his shoulder; “but I will never speak to Agatha again.  She has behaved shamefully to me, and I will tell her so.”

“No doubt she will opine that it is all your fault, dearest, and that I have behaved admirably.  Between you I shall stand exonerated.  And now, since it is too cold for walking, since it is late, since it is far to Lyvern and farther to London, I must improvise some accommodation for you here.”

“But—­”

“But there is no help for it.  You must stay.”

CHAPTER IX

Next day Smilash obtained from his wife a promise that she would behave towards Agatha as if the letter had given no offence.  Henrietta pleaded as movingly as she could for an immediate return to their domestic state, but he put her off with endearing speeches, promised nothing but eternal affection, and sent her back to London by the twelve o’clock express.  Then his countenance changed; he walked back to Lyvern, and thence to the chalet, like a man pursued by disgust and remorse.  Later in the afternoon, to raise his spirits, he took his skates and went to Wickens’s pond, where, it being Saturday, he found the ice crowded with the Alton students and their half-holiday visitors.  Fairholme, describing circles with his habitual air of compressed hardihood, stopped and stared with indignant surprise as Smilash lurched past him.

“Is that man here by your permission?” he said to Farmer Wickens, who was walking about as if superintending a harvest.

“He is here because he likes, I take it,” said Wickens stubbornly.  “He is a neighbor of mine and a friend of mine.  Is there any objections to my having a friend on my own pond, seein’ that there is nigh on two or three ton of other people’s friends on it 108 without as much as a with-your-leave or a by-your-leave.”