Often he would swear to her that the devil might have power to work some miracles, but that he would find it beyond him to change his love for her.

These passionate speeches, however they might have struck his wife in an ordinary way, now seemed to be her chief comfort.  She would come to him, put her paw in his hand and look at him with sparkling eyes shining with joy and gratitude, would pant with eagerness, jump at him and lick his face.

Now he had many little things which busied him in the house—­getting his meals, setting the room straight, making the bed and so forth.  When he was doing this housework it was comical to watch his vixen.  Often she was as it were beside herself with vexation and distress to see him in his clumsy way doing what she could have done so much better had she been able.  Then, forgetful of the decency and the decorum which she had at first imposed upon herself never to run upon all fours, she followed him everywhere, and if he did one thing wrong she stopped him and showed him the way of it.  When he had forgot the hour for his meal she would come and tug his sleeve and tell him as if she spoke:  “Husband, are we to have no luncheon to-day?”

This womanliness in her never failed to delight him, for it showed she was still his wife, buried as it were in the carcase of a beast but with a woman’s soul.  This encouraged him so much that he debated with himself whether he should not read aloud to her, as he often had done formerly.  At last, since he could find no reason against it, he went to the shelf and fetched down a volume of the “History of Clarissa Harlowe,” which he had begun to read aloud to her a few weeks before.  He opened the volume where he had left off, with Lovelace’s letter after he had spent the night waiting fruitlessly in the copse.

   “Good God!

   “What is now to become of me?

   “My feet benumbed by midnight wanderings through the heaviest dews
    that ever fell; my wig and my linen dripping with the hoarfrost
    dissolving on them!

   “Day but just breaking....” etc.

While he read he was conscious of holding her attention, then after a few pages the story claimed all his, so that he read on for about half-an-hour without looking at her.  When he did so he saw that she was not listening to him, but was watching something with strange eagerness.  Such a fixed intent look was on her face that he was alarmed and sought the cause of it.  Presently he found that her gaze was fixed on the movements of her pet dove which was in its cage hanging in the window.  He spoke to her, but she seemed displeased, so he laid “Clarissa Harlowe” aside.  Nor did he ever repeat the experiment of reading to her.