“I thank you, but have an engagement for the morning.” “Well, the next day. They will remain but a few days longer in the city.” “I am sorry, but I shall not be able to go even the next day, I am so busy.” “Busy? ah! that reminds me to ask if you have given up the pencil altogether? Have you wholly abandoned the studio? I never see you now at work in the morning. I had no thought that you had so much of the fashionable taste for morning calls, shopping, and the like.” “Nor have I,” was the quiet answer. “I seldom leave home in the morning.” “Indeed!” with some doubtfulness of countenance, almost amounting to chagrin--“indeed! how is it that I so seldom see you, then?” “The cares of a household, I suppose, might be my sufficient excuse. While my liege lord works abroad, I find my duties sufficiently urgent to task all my time at home.” “Really--but you do not propose to abandon the atelier entirely? Clifford himself, with his great fondness for the art, will scarcely be satisfied that you should, even on a pretence of work.” “I do not know. I do not think that MY HUSBAND”--the last two words certainly emphasized--“cares much about it. I suspect that music and painting, however much they delighted and employed our girlhood, form but a very insignificant part of our duties and enjoyments when we get married.” “But you do not mean to say that a fine landscape, or an exquisite head, gives you less satisfaction than before your marriage?” “I confess they do. Life is a very different thing before and after marriage. It seems far more serious--it appears to me a possession now, and time a sort of property which has to be economized and doled out almost as cautiously as money. I have not touched a brush this fortnight. I doubt if I have been in the painting-room more than once in all this time.” This conversation, which evidently discomfited William Elgerton, was productive to me of no small satisfaction. After a brief interval, consumed in silence, he resumed it:-- “But I must certainly get you to see these pictures. Nay, I must also--since you keep at home--persuade you to look into the studio tomorrow, if it be only to flatter my vanity by looking at a sketch which I have amused myself upon the last three mornings. By-the-way, why may we not look at it tonight?” “We shall not be able to examine it carefully by night,” was the answer, as I fancied, spoken with unwonted coldness and deliberation. “So much the better for me,” he replied, with an ineffectual attempt to laugh; “you will be less able to discern its defects.” “The same difficulty will endanger its beauties,” Julia answered, without offering to rise. “Well, at least, you must arrange for seeing the pictures at ----'s. They are to remain but a few days, and I would not have you miss seeing them for the world. Suppose you say Saturday morning?” “If nothing happens to prevent,” she said; “and I will endeavor to persuade Mr. Clifford to look at them with us.”