So Theodora left to herself sat down with a sinking heart. The change in her husband's temper troubled her; the total absence of all human welcome to her new home troubled her still more. The occupation of her rooms by strangers, the rifling of her trunks, the half-quarrelsome dinner, the despotic changing of her name might be--as compared with death, accident, or ruin--"trivial" troubles, but she was poignantly wounded in her feelings by them. And their crowning grief was one she hardly dared to remember--her husband's failure to defend the name he had so often passionately sworn he loved better than all other names. True, she had permitted him to call her Dora, but that was a secret, sacred, pet name, to be used between themselves, and by that very understanding denied to all others. She could not but admit to herself that she was bitterly disappointed in her home-coming. She had thought Robert's mother and sisters would meet her on the threshold with kisses and words of welcome. She had yet to learn the paucity of kisses and tender words in a Scotch household. The fact is general, but the causes for this familiar repression are various, and may be either good or evil. Theodora felt them in her case to be altogether unkind. What could she do about it? There was the perilous luxury of complaint to her husband and there was her father's lifelong advice: "Shut up a trouble in your heart, and you will soon sing over it." Which course should she take? She was waiting for a true instinct, a clear, lawful perception, when Robert entered the room. She looked up with a smile that brought him swiftly to her side, and when he spoke kindly, all her fearing discontent slipped away. Very soon their conversation turned naturally to their apartments. Robert was proud of them, not so much for the money lavished on their adornment, as for the taste he thought himself to have shown. Going here and there in them, he happened to find, on a beautiful cabinet, an old curl paper and a couple of bent hairpins. "Look here, Dora," he said, and his voice was so full of displeasure, that she rose hastily and went to him. "What kind of maid have you hired? She ought to know better than to leave these things in your parlor." "And you ought to know better, Robert," was the indignant answer, "than to suppose these things belong to me. Do I ever put my hair in newspaper twists? Do I ever fasten it with dirty, rusty, wire pins like these?" "Then tell Ducie to keep her pins and curl papers in her own room." "They are not Ducie's. She would not put such dreadful things in her pretty hair." "How do they come here, then?" "I suppose the people who have been occupying these rooms left them." "No one has occupied these rooms since they were redecorated and refurnished." "You are mistaken, Robert. They have been fully occupied for the last three weeks." "Dora, what are you saying?" "The truth! Call any of your servants, and they will tell you so."