“Well! I’ll tell you the whole truth,” pursued his wife, penitently, “and then perhaps you will. I felt all this, so much, when I was trudging about in the cold, and when I saw a lot of other calculating faces and large baskets trudging about, too, that I began to think whether I mightn’t have done better, and been happier, if—I—hadn’t—” the wedding-ring went round again, and Mrs. Tetterby shook her downcast head as she turned it. “I see,” said her husband quietly; “if you hadn’t married at all, or if you had married somebody else?” “Yes,” sobbed Mrs. Tetterby. “That’s really what I thought. Do you hate me now, ’Dolphus?” “Why no,” said Mr. Tetterby. “I don’t find that I do, as yet.” Mrs. Tetterby gave him a thankful kiss, and went on. “I begin to hope you won’t, now, ’Dolphus, though I’m afraid I haven’t told you the worst. I can’t think what came over me. I don’t know whether I was ill, or mad, or what I was, but I couldn’t call up anything that seemed to bind us to each other, or to reconcile me to my fortune. All the pleasures and enjoyments we had ever had—_they_ seemed so poor and insignificant, I hated them. I could have trodden on them. And I could think of nothing else, except our being poor, and the number of mouths there were at home.” “Well, well, my dear,” said Mr. Tetterby, shaking her hand encouragingly, “that’s truth, after all. We _are_ poor, and there _are_ a number of mouths at home here.” “Ah! but, Dolf, Dolf!” cried his wife, laying her hands upon his neck, “my good, kind, patient fellow, when I had been at home a very little while—how different! Oh, Dolf, dear, how different it was! I felt as if there was a rush of recollection on me, all at once, that softened my hard heart, and filled it up till it was bursting. All our struggles for a livelihood, all our cares and wants since we have been married, all the times of sickness, all the hours of watching, we have ever had, by one another, or by the children, seemed to speak to me, and say that they had made us one, and that I never might have been, or could have been, or would have been, any other than the wife and mother I am. Then, the cheap enjoyments that I could have trodden on so cruelly, got to be so precious to me—Oh so priceless, and dear!—that I couldn’t bear to think how much I had wronged them; and I said, and say again a hundred times, how could I ever behave so, ’Dolphus, how could I ever have the heart to do it!” The good woman, quite carried away by her honest tenderness and remorse, was weeping with all her heart, when she started up with a scream, and ran behind her husband. Her cry was so terrified, that the children started from their sleep and from their beds, and clung about her. Nor did her gaze belie her voice, as she pointed to a pale man in a black cloak who had come into the room. “Look at that man! Look there! What does he want?” “My dear,” returned her husband, “I’ll ask him if you’ll let me go. What’s the matter! How you shake!”