At last there was an enforced retreat to the court, after it had been stripped and impoverished of its most prized treasures, when the nakedness of the land was a constant eye-sore and reproach to its reluctantly returned owners. They had never cultivated the graces of patience and contentment, and they had no gift which could lighten the dreary monotony of what threatened to be a long banishment from their paradise. They might have drifted fast into the evil refuge of bandying reproaches and recriminations, and quarrelling away the dragging hours, as Roy and Reine did not quarrel over their bits of sugar biscuit—only madam was about as pretty, silly, and easily affectionate as the little dogs, with no more exasperating practices of fretting and scolding than they gave way to at times; so that Master Neville, who remained perfectly conscious that he was a being more fully armed and highly endowed, could not find it in his heart to blame her severely, or to wreak on her a revenge for his own misdoings. Doubtless he had been a little disappointed in her. In the days of his young love, when he had extolled her yellow hair and pink and white cheeks, he could hardly have contemplated mating himself to an intellectual baby, who was never to grow any older—rather she was to him then an embryo goddess, who was shortly to find her wisdom and power. But he had enough justice to admit that the disappointment was not her fault, and he took compensation in a certain amusement which he found in his wife’s simplicity, as in that of Roy and Reine, combined as it was with a due regard for him, and as much admiration and reverence for his superior faculties as really narrow natures are capable of; for be it remembered that essentially narrow natures, which are circumscribed both morally and intellectually, can only compass a languid and limited amount of admiration and reverence. Master Neville was fairly kind and indulgent to his wife, though men would have said that she had not been of the least service to him—unless it be service to foster conceit, abet prodigality, and raise an idle laugh. But men take a good deal upon them when they place restrictions on the services of any creature that God has made, though man may have done his best to mar it, while out of evil God brings forth good. It might be that the protecting impulse which Madam Neville drew forth in her husband preserved in him the seed of better things, and kept him from being a harder and worse man than he became.