What had the girl's ideal been? was a question none could answer, and which it is certain her husband never asked. He was very kind to her; she had every comfort, every luxury that he could give her; but she lived in a world of which he knew nothing, and he in and for his profession. He could not have been brought to recognise the possibility of over devotion to the business of his life. He would not have listened to the advance of any claims upon his time, attention, or interest, beyond those which he fulfilled with enthusiasm in the interests of his work, and the courteous observance which he never denied to the rules of his well-regulated household. Chudleigh Wilmot was a clever man in many ways beside that one way in which he was eminently so; but one study had long lain near his hand, and he had never given time or thought to it; one book was close to him, and he had never turned its leaves--the study of his wife's character, the book of his wife's heart. Mabel Wilmot was inveterately, incurably shy, extremely reserved and reticent by nature, and rather sullen. The latter fault of temper had made itself apparent to her husband very early in their married life; and having rebuked it without effect, he made the great mistake of treating it with disregard. He never noticed it now; the symptoms escaped him, the disease did not interest him, and it grew and grew. Proud, cold in manner, distant; scrupulously deferential and dutiful in externals; silent, except where speech was necessary to the management of such affairs as lay within her sphere; calmly indifferent, to all appearance, to all that did not absolutely concern her individually in the course of their life, her shyness and her sullenness were not perceptible to others now--never to him. He did not know that it was so much the worse; he did not understand that it had been better to know and feel her faults than to be ignorant of her and them, unconscious of their growth, or their yielding, or their transformation into others, uglier, worse, harder of eradication, more hopeless of cure. He did not love her. The whole story was in that one sentence.