wonder, with curiosity and suspicion, as on a creature of a different race. Her actions were scrutinized, her little imperfections noted as they never would have been otherwise. Whereas as the richest member of the family, the one standing above them all at once by nature and by position, the family goddess and beauty, and most successful member, Nancy was looked up to and adored. Perhaps it was not wonderful that a young creature with no sense of duty in her, who had expected merely, as Arthur said, to be made happy, flattered, courted, and caressed in her marriage, and to whom such disappointment had come, should prefer the position in which she could regain a little of the self-pride and complacency which was natural to her. The first blow which assails that complacency, how terrible it is! And Nancy had been beaten down, though she would not own it, by the sense of universal disapproval, by the failure even of her own confidence in herself. And it would be impossible to describe the strange desolation and sense that all was over and ended, with which this self-willed and hot-headed girl woke to her misery on the morning after Arthur went away. The probation of the last few months had been very bad for Nancy. She was not altogether unworthy, as poor Arthur was inclined to think, of the higher opinion which had been formed of her; indeed it was the finer element in her nature which had led her astray in the final strain and trial. She who had been the superior of her family, who had been raised to the poetic heaven of a young lover’s adoration, had after her marriage plunged at once into a bottomless abyss of inferiority and humiliation. It had begun upon her wedding-day with the vision of Lucy, in whom her jealous, suddenly enlightened eyes had seen at a glance so many differences, so many refinements unknown to herself--and with Arthur’s objection to her salmon-coloured dress. Then her ignorance, her want even of the most elementary acquaintance with the world he was familiar with, was brought home to the alarmed, resentful girl on every side of her. The more she found herself wanting, the hotter had risen that suppressed fury in her heart against herself, her belongings, her breeding, and the new circumstances which brought out all their deficiencies. Pride first, and the vanity of flattered and self-admiring youth had risen wildly against the apparent need of improvement, of education and culture, which alone would have fitted her to be Arthur’s wife; and if she rejected with proud disgust and self-assertion the idea of improvement in herself, what was there for it but to turn her back upon Arthur’s world and drag him into her own, where she was at her ease, where she was still the first, whatever happened? This, however, had not contented Nancy’s mind. She had been no more satisfied here than elsewhere. The mere fact of withdrawing her husband into this village atmosphere, which he supported patiently or impatiently, according to