“Then I will stay. Do you think it's my duty to go?” she asked, referring her question first to Halleck and then to Atherton. She turned from the silence by which they tried to leave her free. “I don't care for my duty, any more. I don't want to keep him, if it's so that he--left me--and--and meant it--and he doesn't--care for me any--more.” “Care for you? He never cared for you, Marcia! And you may be sure he doesn't care for you now.” “Then let him go, and let us go home.” “Very well!” said the old man. “We will go home, then, and before the week's out Bartley Hubbard will be a perjured bigamist.” “Bigamist?” Marcia leaped to her feet. “Yes, bigamist! Don't you suppose he had his eye on some other woman out there before he began this suit?” The languor was gone from Marcia's limbs. As she confronted her father, the wonderful likeness in the outline of their faces appeared. His was dark and wrinkled with age, and hers was gray with the anger that drove the blood back to her heart, but one impulse animated those fierce profiles, and the hoarded hate in the old man's soul seemed to speak in Marcia's thick whisper, “I will go.” XXXVIII. The Athertons sat late over their breakfast in the luxurious dining-room where the April sun came in at the windows overlooking the Back Bay, and commanding at that stage of the tide a long stretch of shallow with a flight of white gulls settled upon it. They had let Clara's house on the hill, and she had bought another on the new land; she insisted upon the change, not only because everybody was leaving the hill, but also because, as she said, it would seem too much like taking Mr. Atherton to board, if they went to housekeeping where she had always lived; she wished to give him the effect before the world of having brought her to a house of his own. She had even furnished it anew for the most part, and had banished as far as possible the things that reminded her of the time when she was not his wife. He humored her in this fantastic self-indulgence, and philosophized her wish to give him the appearance of having the money, as something orderly in its origin, and not to be deprecated on other grounds, since probably it deceived nobody. They lived a very tranquil life, and Clara had no grief of her own unless it was that there seemed to be no great things she could do for him. One day when she whimsically complained of this, he said: “I'm very glad of that. Let's try to be equal to the little sacrifices we must make for each other; they will be quite enough. Many a woman who would be ready to die for her husband makes him wretched because she won't live for him. Don't despise the day of small things.” “Yes, but when every day seems the day of small things!” she pouted. “Every day _is_ the day of small things,” said Atherton, “with people who are happy. We're never so prosperous as when we can't remember what happened last Monday.” “Oh, but I can't bear to be always living in the present.”