As we came home through the fields singing, if any one had given me three wishes, I should have been puzzled what to ask--and _now_! All the good things I am going to lose march in gloomy procession before my mind. _No house-warming!_ It will have to be put off till we come back, and, by the time that we come back, Bobby will almost certainly have been sent to some foreign station for three or four years. And who knows what may happen before he returns? Perhaps--for I am in the mood when all adversities seem antecedently probable--he will _never_ come back. Perhaps never again shall I be the willing victim of his buffets, never again shall I buffet him in return. And the _sea_! It is all very fine for Sir Roger to take it so easily, to laugh and make unfeeling jokes at my expense! _He_ does not lie on the flat of his back, surrounded by the horrid paraphernalia of sea-sickness. _He_ walks up and down, with his hands in his pockets, smoking a cigar, and talking to the captain. _He_ cares nothing for the heaving planks. The taste of the salt air gives _him_ an appetite. An _appetite_! Oh, prodigious! I must say I think he might have been a _little_ more feeling, might have expressed himself a _little_ more sympathetically. By dint of thinking over Sir Roger's iniquities on this head, I gradually work myself up into such a state of righteous indignation and injury against him, that when, after a longish interval, the door again opens to readmit him, I affect neither to see nor hear him, nor be in any way conscious of his presence. Through the chinks of my fingers, dolorously spread over my face, I see that he has sat down on the other side of the table, just opposite me, and that he is smiling in the same unmirthful, gently sarcastic way, as he was when he left me. "Nancy," he says, "I have been thinking what a pity it is that I have not a _yacht_! We might have taken our own time then, and done it enjoyably--made quite a pleasure-trip of it." I drop my hands into my lap. "People's ideas of pleasure differ," I say, with trite snappishness. "Yes," he answers, a little sadly, "no two people look at any thing in _quite_ the same way, do they?--not even husband and wife." "I suppose not," say I, still thinking of the steward. "Do you know," he says, leaning his arms and his crossed hands on the table between us, and steadfastly regarding me, "that I never saw you look miserable before, never? I did not even know that you _could_!" "I am not _miserable_," I answer, rather ashamed of myself, "that is far too strong a word! Of course I am a little disappointed." Then I mumble off into an indistinctness, whence the nouns "House--warming," "Bobby," "Gold Coast," crop out audibly. "After all," he says, still regarding me, and speaking kindly, yet a little coldly too, "you need not look so woebegone. They say second thoughts are best, do not they? Well, I have been thinking second thoughts, and--I have altered my mind."