"True, O queen! And you needn't be afraid, Belle. You and the babies shall be millionaires, billionaires if you like." And a speech like this, accompanied as it was by the half-careless, half-affectionate glance she knew so well, would start her self-reproach on the road to that sanctuary from all her vague puzzles; the fixed belief that she and John were the most attached of couples. It would, nevertheless, be almost impossible to over-colour the absolute loneliness of the girl's life at this time. Her husband away from dawn till sundown, her only companions a people whose uncouth _patois_ she hardly understood, whose broad simplicity of purpose and passion positively confused her own complexity. It was utter isolation, combined with the persistent reflection that close by in the native town, humanity went to and fro full to the brim with the same emotions of joy and sorrow, hope and fear, though the causes were different. It made her feel as if she had dropped from another world; and being, from physical causes, fanciful, she often thought, when looking over the wide level plain, without one tree to break its contour, which stretched away from her to the horizon, that, but for the force of gravity, she could walk over its visible curve into space. One of her chief amusements was what her husband laughingly called her _jardin d'acclimatisation_; a dreary row of pots where, in defiance of a daily efflorescence of Glaubers salt, she coaxed a dozen or so of disheartened pansies into producing feeble flowers half the size of a wild heart's-ease. She was extremely patient, was Belle Raby, and given to watering and tending all things which she fancied should adorn a woman's house and home; and among them gratitude. Scarcely a day passed but the thought of Philip Marsden's ill-requited kindness set this irreclaimable hero-worshipper into metaphorically besprinkling his grave with her tears, until countless flowers of fact and fancy grew up to weave a crown for his memory, a frame for his virtues. The extent to which she idealised him never came home to her, for the fact of his having passed finally from life prevented her from having to decide his exact position in her Pantheon. Another thing which intensified her inclination to over-estimate the benefits she had received at Philip's hands was her husband's evident desire for complete silence on this subject. Naturally in one so impulsively generous as Belle, this seemed to make her remembrance, and her gratitude, all the more necessary. So time passed until, as women have to do, she began to set her house in order against life or death. To-day, to-morrow, the next day, everything familiar, commonplace,--and then? How the heart beats in swift wonder and impatience even though the cradle may be the grave!