"No," he returned; "but I will tell you all that is annoying me now. My father was in business in our native town, and went on prosperously for many years. Then the tide turned-he met with loss after loss, till nothing remained but the old homestead, and on that there was a mortgage. We concealed the state of things from my mother; her health was delicate, and we never let her know a trouble we could spare her. Now she has gone, and we have found it necessary to sell our old home and to divide and scatter the family. My father's mental distress when he found others suffering from his own losses threw him into the state in which you see him now. I have therefore assumed his debts, and with God's help hope in time to pay them to the uttermost farthing. It will be necessary for us to live economically until this is done. There are two pressing cases that I am trying to meet at once. This has given me a preoccupied air, I have no doubt, and made you suspect and misunderstand me. But now you know the whole, my darling." I felt my injustice and childish folly very keenly, and told him so. "But I think, dear Ernest," I added, "if you will not be hurt at my saying so, that you have led me to it by not letting me share at once in your cares. If you had at the outset just told me the whole story, you would have enlisted my sympathies in your father's behalf, and in your own. I should have seen the reasonableness of your breaking up the old home and bringing him here, and it would have taken the edge of my bitter, bitter disappointment about my mother." "I feel very sorry about that," he said. "It would be a real pleasure to have her here. But as things are now, she could not be happy with us." "There is no room," I put in. "I am truly sorry. And now my dear little wife must have patience with her stupid blundering old husband, and we'll start together once more fair and square. Don't wait, next time, till you are so full that you boil over; the moment I annoy you by my inconsiderate ways, come right and tell me." I called myself all the horrid names I could think of. "May I ask one thing more, now we are upon the subject?" I said at last. "Why couldn't your sister Helen have come here instead of Martha?" He smiled a little. "In the first place, Helen would be perfectly if she had the care of father in his present. She is too young to have such responsibility. In the second place, my brother John, with whom she has gone to live, has a wife who would be quite crushed by my father and Martha. She is one of those little tender, soft souls one could crush fingers. Now, you are not of that sort; you have force of character enough to enable you to live with them, while maintaining your own dignity and remaining yourself in spite of circum stances." "I thought you admired Martha above all thing and wanted me to be exactly like her." "I do admire her, but I do not want you to be like anybody but yourself."