About this time I must write down how I was made to feel rebuked and neglected. Following that unguided reference to her husband, Peg would seem to have deserted me. My eyes had little of her, and I heard her voice still less; for while she was often in to gossip with the General, or read those Senate speeches to him, she gave me only stray, cold glances and monosyllables. She came no more to my workshop; and day after day I sat alone while melancholy crept upon me like mosses over stone. I was not so dense but I could tell how I had offended. Peg was proud; she resented my suggestion that Eaton lacked appreciation; that was why she flew upon me, beak and talon, and said it was I who lived in darkness of her. I had been the wiser had I forgotten those tears of hers so soon as they were dry, and withstood myself from meddling opinions concerning her lot in life. Peg's coldness was the proper retort for my impertinence, and I must bear it even while it broke my heart. It would be the expected thing that I should turn cheerless and be cast down when now Peg left me with my thoughts alone. I had grown so used to her about me, and to hear the sweet laugh of her, that it was to miss something out of my life when she took herself away. And yet it would be egotism. Folk miss and for a while deplore what has become a piece of their days--even chains and dungeons, so I've heard. Nor is this due to any love save self-love. I have often considered, as folk shed tears on a grave, how they wept for themselves and not for him who slept at their feet. It was the merest selfishness of habit, this dejection because Peg would desert me. Her absence would become custom in time, and then, should' she return, that coming doubtless would irk me just as much. For all my wisdom, however, when now my starved eyes came only by stray, sparse glimpses of Peg, as I beheld her now and again across in the President's Square, or when she went by my door on her visits to the General, my spirit fell to be jaded and vastly lowered. Had I known my way to go about it, I would have sought Peg out and talked with her freely and in full of what had fallen to be our differences. I would have acknowledged my error. But I saw no open gate through which to come by such converse, and I feared with an attempt to plunge bad into worse. Once, indeed, my resolve was half hatched to gain some plain speech of her. I lay in wait until, the day being fine, I had sight of her on a rustic seat over across in the square. She was wrapped in a fur of some sort--martin, I think--and, with this drawn high about the throat, it so framed her face as to make her beautiful to the verge of witchcraft.