When I rose this morning, I did not think that I should have cried before night; indeed, nothing would have seemed to me so unlikely. Cry! on the day of Roger's first back-coming! absurd! And yet now the morning is still quite young, and I have wept abundantly. I am always rather good at crying. Tears with me do not argue any very profound depth of affliction. My tears have always been somewhat near my eyes, a fact well known to the boys, whom my pearly drops always leave as stolid and unfeeling as they found them. But the case is different with Roger. Either he is ignorant, or he has forgotten the facility with which I weep, and his distress is proportioned to his ignorance. My eyes are dried again now, though they and my nose still keep a brave after-glow; and Roger and I are at one again. But, for my part, on this first day, I think it would have been pleasanter if we had never been at two. However, smiling peace is now again restored to us, and no one, to look at us, as we sit in my boudoir after breakfast, would think that we, or perhaps I should say I, had been so lately employed in chasing her away. As little would any one, looking at the blandness of Vick's profile, as she slumbers on the window-seat in the sun, conjecture of her master-passion for the calves of strangers' legs. "So you see that I _must_ go, Nancy," says Roger, with a rather wistful appeal to my reason, of whose supremacy he is not, perhaps, quite so confident as he was when he got up this morning. "You understand, don't you, dear?" I nod. "Yes, I understand." I still speak in a subdued and snuffly voice, but the wrath has gone out of me. "Well, you--would you mind," he says, speaking rather hesitatingly, as not quite sure of the reception that his proposition may meet with--"would you mind coming with me as far as Zéphine's?" "Do you mean come all the way, and go in with you, and stay while you are there?" cry I, with great animation, as a picture of the strict supervision which, by this course of conduct, I shall be enabled to exercise over Mrs. Zéphine's oscillades, poses, and little verbal tendernesses, flashes before my mind's eye. Roger looks down. "I do not know about _that_," he says, slowly. "Perhaps she would not care to go into her husband's liabilities before a--a str--before a third person!" "Two is company and three is none, in fact," say I, with a slight relapse into the disdainful and snorting mood. He looks distressed, but attempts no argument or explanation. "How far did you mean me to come, then?" say I, half ashamed of my humors, but still with an after-thought of pettishness in my voice. "Escort you to the hall-door, I suppose, and kick my heels among the laurestines until such time as all Mr. Huntley's bills are paid?" He turns away.