After a few minutes he returns, carrying a basket covered with a piece of sacking; a dishevelled-looking hen, with spread wings trailing and her breast bare from sitting on her eggs, screeches after him. He puts it carefully down and uncovers it, disclosing seven little balls of yellow fluff splashed with olive-green; they look up sideways with bright round eyes, and their little spoon-bills look disproportionately large. "Aren't they beauties?" enthusiastically. "This one is just out," taking up an egg; "mustn't let it get chilled; there is a chip out of it and a piece of hanging skin. Isn't it funny?" he asks, showing her how it is curled in the shell, with its paddles flattened and its bill breaking through the chip, and the slimy feathers sticking to its violet skin. She suppresses an exclamation of disgust, and looks at his fresh-tinted skin instead. He is covering basket, hen, and all. "How you love young things!" she says. "Some! I had a filly once; she turned out a lovely mare! I cried when I had to sell her; I wouldn't have let any one in God's world mount her." "Yes, you would!" "Who?" with a quick look of resentment. "Me!" "I wouldn't!" "What! you wouldn't?" "I wouldn't!" "I think you would if I wanted to!" with a flash out of the tail of her eye. "No, I wouldn't!" "Then you would care more for her than for me. I would give you your choice," passionately, "her or me!" "What nonsense!" "Maybe," concentrated; "but it's lucky she isn't here to make deadly sense of it." A humble-bee buzzes close to her ear, and she is roused to a sense of facts, and laughs to think how nearly they have quarrelled over a mare that was sold before she knew him. Some evenings later she is stretched motionless in a chair; and yet she conveys an impression of restlessness,--a sensitively nervous person would feel it. She is gazing at her husband; her brows are drawn together, and make three little lines. He is reading, reading quietly, without moving his eyes quickly from side to side of the page as she does when she reads, and he pulls away at a big pipe with steady enjoyment. Her eyes turn from him to the window, and follow the course of two clouds; then they close for a few seconds, then open to watch him again. He looks up and smiles. "Finished your book?" There is a singular, soft monotony in his voice; the organ with which she replies is capable of more varied expression. "Yes, it is a book makes one think. It would be a greater book if he were not an Englishman; he's afraid of shocking the big middle class. You wouldn't care about it." "Finished your smoke?" "No, it went out; too much fag to light up again! No," protestingly, "never you mind, old boy, why do you?" He has drawn his long length out of his chair, and kneeling down beside her guards a lighted match from the incoming evening air. She draws in the smoke contentedly, and her eyes smile back with a general vague tenderness. "Thank you, dear old man!"