“Robert, let me sit down on the bench, and sit you beside me.  It is too dark for people to notice us, and we shall not be very cold.”

“No, my darling;” and he slipped his plaid round her shoulders, and his arm with it.

She looked up pitifully.  “Don’t be vexed with me, Robert, dear; I have thought it all over; weighed it on every side; nights and nights I have been awake pondering what was right to do.  And it always comes to the same thing.”

“What?”

“It’s the old story,” she answered with a feeble smile. “’I canna leave my minnie.’  There is nobody in the world to take care of Johanna but me, not even Elizabeth, who is engrossed in little Henry.  If I left her, I am sure it would kill her.  And she can not come with me.  Dear!” (the only fond name she ever called him) “for these three years—­you say it need only be three years—­you will have to go back to India alone.”

Robert Lyon was a very good man; but he was only a man, not an angle; and though he made comparatively little show of it, he was a man very deeply in love.  With that jealous tenacity over his treasure, hardly blamable, since the love is worth little which does not wish to have its object “all to itself,” he had, I am afraid, contemplated not without pleasure the carrying off of Hilary to his Indian home; and it had cost him something to propose that Johanna should go too.  He was very fond of Johanna; still—­

If I tell what followed will it forever lower Robert Lyon in the estimation of all readers?  He said, coldly, “As you please, Hilary;” rose up, and never spoke another word till they reached home.

It was the first dull tea table they had ever known; the first time Hilary had ever looked at that dear face, and seen an expression there which made her look away again.  He did not sulk; he was too gentlemanly for that; he even exerted himself to make the meal pass pleasantly as usual; but he was evidently deeply wounded; nay, more, displeased.  The strong, stern man’s nature within him had rebelled; the sweetness had gone out of his face, and something had come into it which the very best of men have sometimes:  alas for the woman who cannot understand and put up with it!

I am not going to preach the doctrine of tyrants and slaves; but when two walk together they must be agreed, or if by any chance they are not agreed, one must yield.  It may not always be the weaker, or in weakness may lie the chiefest strength; but it must be one or other of the two who has to be the first to give way; and, save in very exceptional cases, it is, and it ought to be, the woman.  God’s law and nature’s which is also God’s, ordains this; instinct teaches it; Christianity enforces it.