Lucy did look tired and unrefreshed, and, to speak more plainly, very cross. Her hair, in its dryest state of pale yellow, was combed straight back above her temples; her skin was sallow; her wrapper carelessly put on, and its dead white unrelieved by even a bow of ribbon at the throat. Involuntarily Lewis glanced from the uninviting picture to his household deity, in her neat breakfast-dress of gray silk faced with pink, her glossy hair and tranquil features, and said to himself, in secret triumph, "Which is now the beauty? None of your trumpery ornamental articles for me!" Philip's eyes were as keen as his host's, and the probability is that he instituted a similar comparison, however well his pride succeeded in concealing the act and its result. Cutting short his wife's querulous plaints of the discomforts of travel, and the horrors of nervous sleeplessness, he opened a conversation with Mr. Hammond in the subdued, perfectly-managed tones Sarah remembered so well, selecting such topics as would interest a business man and a citizen of a commercial metropolis. Lucy pouted, and applied herself for consolation to her breakfast. With a strange mingling of emotions, Sarah listened to the dialogue between the gentlemen. She was anxious that Lewis should acquit himself creditably. Brilliant, like Philip, he could never be; but in sterling sense, not many men were his superiors. She had never had cause to be ashamed of him; for one so unpretending and judicious was not liable to make himself ridiculous. Whence, then, the solicitude with which she hung upon his every word? her disappointment when he did not equal the ideal reply she had fashioned, as she heard the words that called it forth? Several times she joined in the conversation, invariably to corroborate Lewis' assertions, or to supply something he had omitted to state. Philip Benson was a student of human nature. Was his mind sufficiently abstracted from his domestic annoyances to divine the motive that Sarah herself only perceived afterwards in solitary self-examination? Not love of, or admiration for the intrinsic excellence of the man whose name she bore; not fear lest his modesty should lessen his merits in the eyes of others; but a selfish dread that his acute interlocutor, discerning in him nothing likely to attract or win the affection of a woman such as he knew her to be, might guess her true reason for marrying Mr. Hammond. The timorous progeny of one guilty secret can only be numbered by the minutes during which it is borne in the bosom. Like the fabled Lacedæmonian boy, Sarah carried the gnawing horror with a fortitude that looked like cheerfulness. Habit cannot lighten the weight of a clinging curse; but strength and hardness come in time, if the burdened one is not early crushed by his load.