“Why, you are not looking well,” he said, only just aware of the fact. “Are you sick? Did you get worn out taking care of me?” She waited an instant till the others, who were leaving the room, should be out of sight, then leaned across the table, careless that her sleeve swept away the two armies she had just placed, and took her husband’s hand in hers, and bowed her cheek to it with a sob. “O Lawrence! Lawrence!” she whispered. He made a motion to draw his hand away, but let it remain. “My God! what is the matter with you?” he exclaimed. She leaned back instantly, and made an effort to control herself. “It must be that I am not well. Don’t mind me. And now, you will have to place your own men, and give me the first move.” He placed the men, and appeared to be thinking pitifully of his wife as he glanced now and then into her face. “It seems selfish of me not to have taken better care of you, Annette,” he said. “Oh! you needed care yourself,” she replied lightly. “Don’t imagine that I am sick, though. It is nothing. You didn’t marry me to take care of me, you know, and I am not very exacting.” She would have caught back the last words, if she could, before it was too late. They escaped her unawares, and were a remembered, rather than a present, bitterness. He blushed faintly. “Whatever I married you for, I have no desire to exchange you now for any one else,” he said, moving a pawn sideways instead of forward. “If you were ever so poor, I wouldn’t want a rich girl in your place. But then, you know, I’m not sentimental. I never was much so, and it’s all over now. I’m thirty years old, and I feel a hundred. I can’t remember being young. I can’t remember being twenty years of age. I wish to God I could!” he burst forth. His wife made a careful move, and said, “I have a presentiment that I shall give you check in three moves more. Look out for your queen.” “My only romance,” he went on, “was about Honora. I thought that I could do and be anything, if she would only care about me. What a stately, floating creature she always was! I used to think she looked as if she could walk on clouds and not fall through. Yes,” he sighed, “that is where she belongs—among the clouds. I never blamed her for not having me; she was too good. I never was worthy of such a woman.” Slowly, while he spoke, the bright blood had deepened in his wife’s face, and swept over her forehead. Had he been less preoccupied, he would have seen the slight, haughty movement with which she drew herself up. It was only when he had waited a moment for her to move that he glanced up and met her eyes fixed on him with an expression very like indignant scorn. “By what strange contradiction is it, I wonder,” she said coldly, “that the woman who does most for a man, and is most merciful and charitable toward him, is never too good for him, while the one who scorns him, and will not come a step off her pedestal to save him, is always the ideal woman in his eyes?”