Arthur heard everything in the next room. He had himself felt the change in his position sorely on the previous night; and Mr. Eagles’ sharp, yet somewhat mournful adjurations to him not to lose his time, to go on with his work, to do something, had intensified the effect. He had come upstairs early enough to hear the style of Nancy’s conversation with the two ladies, and this also had touched him deeply. What is more painful than to see those whom we love giving what, to our eyes, is a false representation of themselves to the outside world, which does not know them? Arthur felt this tingle to his very finger-points--a painful shame; her foolish rudeness, and the wrong which she did herself by this misrepresentation had made him miserable. If they could but see her as he knew her--as she was on other occasions? This, he said to himself, was not Nancy; it was a foolish braggart of the village, the type of the Bates family, not his wife, who was as much above the Bates in fine taste and perception as she was in beauty. To be sure, her taste had not lately told for very much. But that had been the influence of the uncomfortable position in which she had felt herself, or of her connections, whom she had so unfortunately insisted on coming back to. The pain had been exquisite with which Arthur watched his bride through this first appearance in society. It brought back to him the feelings which he had tried to forget, with which he had come in upon the violent termination of her interview with Mrs. Anthony Curtis. Was there nothing he could do, or say, which would persuade her that this was not the way to meet strangers who might turn out to be friends? He was sitting unhappy enough over his fire, having taken out a book or two, which lay on the table beside the “Times,” the usual occupation of his aimless morning. He had been trying to “read” as Mr. Eagles understood reading; but what were Demosthenes and Cicero to him? He could not go back now, and toil over the intricacies of language and argument which wanted all his attention ceaselessly, with happy ease of mind, not with painful pre-occupation of it, as he had pursued those studies in their earlier stages. He had never been a hard student, and why should he read now? What good would it do him? Would all the reading in the world, or his degree, when he had taken it, restore him to the world in which his wife could not accompany him, and would not try to accompany him, and where he could not go without her? He had been sitting dreamily over the fire, thinking it all over. The vague plan in his mind had been when Nancy was a little better prepared for it, a little more likely to incline in her own mind towards it, and willing to try to make the experiment successful, to take her home and present her to his father and mother, hoping that the surprise and the pleasure of his own return might procure them a welcome; this is what he had thought of even when he had