But I could not stop. The floods of the great deep were broken up at last, and I had to cry. If I could have told my troubles to some one I could thus have found vent for them, but there was no one to whom I had a right to speak of my husband. Ernest walked up and down in silence. Oh, if I could have cried on his breast, and felt that he loved and pitied me! At last, as I grew quieter, he came and sat by me. "This has come upon me like a thunderclap," he said. "I did not know I kept your heart hungry. I did not know you wished your mother to live with us. And I took it for granted that my wife, with her high-toned, heroic character, would sustain me in every duty, and welcome my father and sister to our home. I do not know what I can do now. Shall I send them away?" "No, no!" I cried. "Only be good to me, Ernest, only love me, only look at me with your own eyes, and not with other people's. You knew I had faults when you married me; I never tried to conceal them." "And did you fancy I had none myself?" he asked. "No," I replied. "I saw no faults in you. Everybody said you were such a noble, good man and you spoke so beautifully one night at an evening meeting." "Speaking beautifully is little to the purpose less one lives beautifully," he said, sadly. "And now is it possible that you and I, a Christian man and a Christian woman, are going on and on with scenes as this? Are you to wear your very life out because I have not your frantic way of loving, and am I to be made weary of mine because I cannot satisfy you?" "But, Ernest," I said, "you used to satisfy me. Oh, how happy I was in those first days when we were always together; and you seemed so fond me!" I was down on the floor by this time, and looking up into his pale, anxious face. "Dear child," he said, "I do love you, and that more than you know. But you would not have me leave my work and spend my whole time telling you so?" "You know I am not so silly," I cried.. "It is not fair, it is not right to talk as if I were. I ask for nothing unreasonable. I only want those little daily assurances of your affection which I should suppose would be spontaneous if you felt at all towards me as I do to you." "The fact is," he returned, "I am absorbed in my work. It brings many grave cares and anxieties. I spend most of my time amid scenes of suffering and at dying beds. This makes me seem abstracted and cold, but it does not make you less dear. On the contrary, the sense it gives me of the brevity and sorrowfulness of life makes you doubly precious, since it constantly reminds me that sick beds and dying beds must sooner or later come to our home as to those of others." I clung to him as he uttered these terrible words. In an agony of terror. "Oh, Ernest, promise me, promise me that you will not die first," I pleaded. "Foolish little thing!" he said, and was as silly, for a while, as the silliest heart could ask. Then he became serious again.