"You must write to Lord Seely this evening, Cassy," he said one day on returning home to dinner. He had found his wife at her desk, and, on seeing him, she huddled away a confused heap of papers into a drawer, and hastily shut it. "Must I?" she answered gloomily. "Well, I don't wish to use an offensive phrase. You will write to oblige me. It has been put off long enough." "Why should I oblige you?" said Castalia, looking up at him with sunken eyes. She looked so ill and haggard, as to arrest Algernon's attention--not too lavishly bestowed on her in general. "Cassy," said he, "I am afraid you are not well!" The tears came into her eyes. She turned her head away. "Do you really care whether I am ill or well?" she asked. "Do I really care? What a question! Of course I care. Are you suffering?" "N--no; not now. I believe I should not feel any suffering if you only loved me, Ancram." "Castalia! How can you be so absurd?" He rose from his seat beside her, and walked impatiently up and down the room. Nothing irritated him so much as to be called on for sentiment or tenderness. "There!" she exclaimed, with a little despondent gesture of the head, "you were speaking and looking kindly, and I have driven you away! I wish I was dead." Algernon stopped in his walk, and cast a singular look at his wife. Then after a moment he said, in his usual light manner, "My dear Cassy, you are low and nervous. It really is not good for you to mope by yourself as you do. Come, rouse yourself to write this letter to my lord, then after dinner you can have the fly to drive to my mother's. She complains that she sees you very seldom." "Will you come too, Ancram?" "I----well, yes; if it is possible, I will come too." "I think," said Castalia, putting her hands on his shoulders, and gazing wistfully into his face, "that if you and I could go away to some quiet strange place--far away from all these odious people--across the seas somewhere--I think we might be happy even now." "Upon my honour, there's nothing I should like so much as to get away across the seas! And you might as well hint to my lord, in the course of your letter, that I should be very well contented with a berth in the Colonies. A good climate, of course! One wouldn't care to be shipped off to Sierra Leone!" "I will write that to Uncle Val, willingly. But--don't ask me to beg money of him again." Algernon made a rapid calculation in his mind, and answered without appreciable pause, "Well, Cassy, it shall be as you will. But as to begging----that, I think, is scarcely the word between us and Lord Seely." "I'll run upstairs and bathe my eyes, and I shall still have time to write before dinner," said Castalia, and left the room.