The family, by this time, was at its fourth or fifth removal. Mr. Asquith had not got the living when the invalid rector died to whom he was _locum tenens_; and if his heart ever grew sick of his toils and poorly rewarded labour, it was at the moment when the family had to turn out of the nice old-fashioned rectory which they had been allowed to occupy during that period of expectation. For one moment the curate had asked himself what was the use of it all, and had said, in the bitterness of his heart, that his work never had time to come to anything, and that all the fond hopes of doing good, and bettering the poor, and helping the weak, with which he had set out in life, had come to nought. Women are perhaps not so apt to come to such a conclusion, and though Mary was aware, too, of many a defeat and downfall, she did her best to console him. “And then there are the children,” she said. The poor man, at that moment, felt that the children were the last aggravation of his trouble, so many helpless creatures to be dragged after him wherever he had to go. He looked at the hand which his wife had put upon his to comfort him. What a pretty hand it had once been! and now how scarred and marked with work, its pretty whiteness gone, its texture spoiled, the forefinger half sewed away, the very shape of it, once so taper and delicate, lost. “Oh,” he said, “what a hard life I have brought upon you, Mary! To think if I had only had more command of myself, you might never have known any trouble!” Mary replied with a shriek, “Do you mean if we had never married? I think you have gone out of your senses, Harry.” “I think I almost have, with trouble,” said the poor man. And yet, after all, his trouble was not half hers. It was she who had to bear the children, and nurse them, and have all the fatigue of them; it was she who had to scheme about the boys’ shoes and their schooling, and how to get warm things for the winter, and to meet the butchers and bakers when they came to suggest that they had heavy payments to make: and to bear all these burdens with a smile, lest _he_ should break down. When she had sent him out, frightened into better spirits by the ridiculous absurdity of the suggestion that they might never have married (which was much the same as saying that this world might never have been created; and that, no doubt, would have saved a great deal of trouble), Mary made her little explosion in her turn. “It is much papa knows!” she cried. “I wonder if he had our work for a day or two what he would think of it. And now we shall have to pack into a small house again, where he can have no quiet room for his study. Oh, Hetty, what shall we do? What shall we do?”