Alice scanned his face closely while he spoke, and held her breath as if in expectant suspense. Her countenance clouded once more. “You don't realize, Theron,” she said gravely; “your voice when you speak to me, your look, your manner, they have all changed. You are like another man--some man who never loved me, and doesn't even know me, much less like me. I want to know what the end of it is to be. Up to the time of your sickness last summer, until after the Soulsbys went away, I didn't let myself get downright discouraged. It seemed too monstrous for belief that you should go away out of my life like that. It didn't seem possible that God could allow such a thing. It came to me that I had been lax in my Christian life, especially in my position as a minister's wife, and that this was my punishment. I went to the altar, to intercede with Him, and to try to loose my burden at His feet. But nothing has come of it. I got no help from you.” “Really, Alice,” broke in Theron, “I explained over and over again to you how preoccupied I was--with the book--and affairs generally.” “I got no assistance from Heaven either,” she went on, declining the diversion he offered. “I don't want to talk impiously, but if there is a God, he has forgotten me, his poor heart-broken hand-maiden.” “You are talking impiously, Alice,” observed her husband. “And you are doing me cruel injustice, into the bargain.” “I only wish I were!” she replied; “I only wish to God I were!” “Well, then, accept my complete assurance that you ARE--that your whole conception of me, and of what you are pleased to describe as my change toward you, is an entire and utter mistake. Of course, the married state is no more exempt from the universal law of growth, development, alteration, than any other human institution. On its spiritual side, of course, viewed either as a sacrament, or as--” “Don't let us go into that,” interposed Alice, abruptly. “In fact, there is no good in talking any more at all. It is as if we didn't speak the same language. You don't understand what I say; it makes no impression upon your mind.” “Quite to the contrary,” he assured her; “I have been deeply interested and concerned in all you have said. I think you are laboring under a great delusion, and I have tried my best to convince you of it; but I have never heard you speak more intelligibly or, I might say, effectively.” A little gleam of softness stole over Alice's face. “If you only gave me a little more credit for intelligence,” she said, “you would find that I am not such a blockhead as you think I am.” “Come, come!” he said, with a smiling show of impatience. “You really mustn't impute things to me wholesale, like that.” She was glad to answer the smile in kind. “No; but truly,” she pleaded, “you don't realize it, but you have grown into a way of treating me as if I had absolutely no mind at all.”