‘I’ll try.’

’Have you been wanting to get away from this place —­ I mean, to live somewhere else?’

‘I?  What can have made you think so?’

‘That isn’t trying to answer a question, you know.’

Alma, after looking keenly at him, had turned her face to the window.  She kept silence, and wore a look of calm reflectiveness.

‘Have you been bored and wearied by this life?’ Harvey asked in his most good-natured tone.

‘I don’t think I have ever for a moment shown a sign of it,’ replied Alma, with grave conviction.

‘So much the worse, if it meant that you concealed your thoughts.’

’I shall always be content, Harvey, so long as I see you are living the kind of life that suits you.’

He uttered a shout of humorous, yet half-genuine, exasperation.

’Do you want me to swear it’s a long time since I lost the habit, but it might strike you as manly, and perhaps I had better practise again.  What has it to do with you, the kind of life that suits me?  Don’t you remember my talking about that before we were married?  I’ve had a suspicion that you were getting rather into that state of mind.  You dropped your music, and partly, I’ve no doubt, because you didn’t find enough intelligent sympathy in me.  You went in for painting, and you’ve dropped that ——­’

‘It was winter, you see,’ Alma interrupted.

’Yes, but that wasn’t the only reason.  It meant general failure of energy —­ the kind of thing I’ve known myself, only too well.’

‘What —­ here?’ asked Alma, with some alacrity.

’I meant now and again, all through my life.  No; here I’ve gone on right enough, with a tolerably even mind; and for that very reason I haven’t noticed any signs of the other thing in you —­ till just now, when you lost your head.  Why haven’t you been frank with me?’

‘You take it for granted that I had anything to be frank about,’ Alma remarked.

‘Yes —­ and you don’t contradict me.’

‘Then what were you going to say, Harvey?’

She bent towards him, with that air of sweet reasonableness which showed her features at their best:  eye tranquil and intelligent, lips ingenuously smiling; a countenance she wore not thrice in a twelvemonth, but by Harvey well remembered amid all changes, and held to express the true being of the woman he loved.

‘Why, I was going to say, dear,’ he replied tenderly, ’that no good can come of sacrificing your instincts.  You have not to ask yourself whether I am lazily comfortable —­ for that’s what it amounts to —­ but what you are making of your life.  Remember, for one thing, that I am considerably older ——­’

‘Please!’ She checked him with an extended hand.  ’I don’t want to remember anything of the kind.’