Annie left her husband’s room that night, after his most unexpected declaration of love and her own promise to try to return it, in a state of bewilderment in which thought was for a long time impossible. That his affection for her was anything more than a passing caprice, the result partly of jealousy of his brothers, and partly of pique at her own indifference, she did not for a moment believe. If her heart had been quite free, she might have been less skeptical, or more clearly touched by this acknowledgment of the strength of the influence she had gained over her rough and hitherto careless young husband. But she knew how deep lay the difference between his nature and her own, and since the first weeks of her marriage she had given up all hope of their ever harmonizing with each other except in the most superficial manner. Through his passionate words she had seemed, in spite of herself, to hear the ring of another voice, and she felt, with a thrill of shame, that no words of the man she had sworn to love could wake in her an emotion so strong as that she had felt at the few faltering words in which Aubrey Cooke had confessed that he loved her. And Aubrey Cooke was out in the world working hard, as she felt, to win position and money, to make himself a name, to rise to the heights of the ambition she had encouraged; and perhaps even yet, in spite of her discouraging words to him, he was nursing the vain belief that she would some day be his, and longing for the time when they should wander out together again, and have more long talks, in which the words of each seemed but to express the unuttered thought of the other; while Harry, her husband, would remain an ignorant idler to the end of his life, ill-tempered, arrogant, unsympathetic to her, as if he had been an inhabitant of another world. And this man she had promised to try to love, with the honest, solemn intention of keeping her word to the best of her power! But she confessed to herself, with a shudder at the thought of the self-sacrifice she would have to make if his caprice were to last and she were to have to put off indefinitely her return to the stage, that she had an uphill task before her. The next morning she met her husband in the expectation of finding him as ungracious as usual. But Harry had apparently been thinking out the position, and come to the conclusion that the effort must not be all on his wife’s side. At any rate, he was gentle and considerate, and asked her if she would drive him out, in a courteous tone which seemed to admit the possibility of a refusal.