given her for gratitude.  Had he not taken her to his bosom, and bestowed upon her the half of all that he had, simply for herself, asking for nothing more than her love?  He had possessed money, position, a name all that makes life worth having.  He had found her in a remote corner of the world, with no fortune, with no advantages of family or social standing, so circumstanced that any friend would have warned him against such a marriage; but he had given her his heart, and his hand, and his house, and had asked for nothing in return but that he should be all in all to her, that he should be her one god upon earth.  And he had done more even than this.  ’Bring your sister,’ he had said.  ’The house shall be big enough for her also, and she shall be my sister as well as yours.’  Who had ever done more for a woman, or shown a more absolute confidence?  And now what was the return he received?  She was not contented with her one god upon earth, but must make to herself other gods—­another god, and that too out of a lump of the basest clay to be found around her.  He thought that he could remember to have heard it said in early days, long before he himself had had an idea of marrying, that no man should look for a wife from among the tropics, that women educated amidst the languors of those sunny climes rarely came to possess those high ideas of conjugal duty and feminine truth which a man should regard as the first requisites of a good wife.  As he thought of all this, he almost regretted that he had ever visited the Mandarins, or ever heard the name of Sir Marmaduke Rowley.

He should have nourished no such thoughts in his heart.  He had, indeed, been generous to his wife and to his wife’s family; but we may almost say that the man who is really generous in such matters is unconscious of his own generosity.  The giver who gives the most, gives, and does not know that he gives.  And had not she given too?  In that matter of giving between a man and his wife, if each gives all, the two are equal, let the things given be what they may!  King Cophetua did nothing for his beggar maid, unless she were to him, after he had married her, as royal a queen as though he had taken her from the oldest stock of reigning families then extant.  Trevelyan knew all this himself, had said so to himself a score of times, though not probably in spoken words or formed sentences.  But, that all was equal between himself and the wife of his bosom, had been a thing ascertained by him as a certainty.  There was no debt of gratitude from her to him which he did not acknowledge to exist also as from him to her.  But yet, in his anger, he could not keep himself from thinking of the gifts he had showered upon her.  And he had been, was, would ever be, if she would only allow it, so true to her!  He had selected no other friend to take her place in his councils!  There was no ‘dear Mary’ or ‘dear Augusta’ with whom he had secrets to be kept from his wife.  When there arose with him any question of interest such as was this of the return of Sir Marmaduke to her, he would show it in all its bearings to his wife.  He had his secrets too, but his secrets had all been made secrets for her also.  There was not a woman in the world in whose company he took special delight in her absence.