his stockings and order his good dinner and nurse him through the indigestion consequent upon the dinner--the old, anxious wife, who has had the children and reared them, who has planned and economized and toiled with him, who has borne the burden and heat of the day at his side--the prosaic wife, who gives, unasked, such good advice. Every one will admit that this elderly person has been, and (to a limited degree) still is, a necessity to every Thomas. But sometimes Thomas thinks, in his simple way, that it would be pleasant to have the luxuries as well as the necessities of life; to have, for instance, a young wife--a pretty wife, clever and light-hearted and gayly tyrannical; a wife who never knew enough to advise anybody, who should be a relaxation and a refreshment, _and just a little bit of a fool_; for, as every intelligent (unmarried) woman knows, men like fools; feminine fools. Of course the trouble is that if you supply a wife for two sides of a man's character--for utility, so to speak, and for diversion--he may, not unreasonably, demand that every side and angle and facet of his jewel-like nature have its own feminine setting. That was probably Solomon's idea. Well, well! the time is not yet for this reasonable arrangement; and it is possible that trade in galvanized buckets will never warrant its extensive existence. But all this is very frivolous compared to the reality of this poor woman's pain, a pain that finally evolved a plan which, although less picturesque than the harem, was of the same grade in the eye of the law, though, curiously enough, not in her own eye. She could not, as she expressed it to herself, be dead, so that her Thomas might have his wish; _but he could think she was dead_. When this extraordinary idea came into Milly Dilworth's head, she felt as one imprisoned in darkness who sees, far off, the glimmer of daylight. He "could think she was dead!" And if he thought so, of course there could be nothing wrong in his marrying "_her_." (Miss Hayes's moral status did not enter into Milly's calculations.) The light in her darkness dazzled poor Milly at first, and the way was not clear. It took two weeks of further thought to decide upon the step, and then to evolve its details; but one need not go into them as Milly did.... As she sat at her work, day after day, she thought her plan out slowly and toilsomely. At first she kept balking at the enormity of it. Then some chance word would betray Tom's admiration for brains, and she would beat and spur her mind up to her project again.... And at last she accepted it.... Once accepted, the thing was settled. Her mind had about as much flexibility as a bar of lead, and there was no changing it. It only remained to decide upon the details. This she did slowly and painfully. Each step was planned, each contingency arranged for. And by-and-by the day came to act.