‘If I could believe that! But where another woman would have been contented, I have been ill at ease. I hate myself for it! I hate my life! But oh! I love you! You do not doubt it, dear?’ ‘If I doubted it I should be a miserable man.’ ‘Whatever happened, you would still believe it.’ ‘Till my dying day. You have proved it,’ ‘Have I, James?’ ‘God knows you have. You are not like common women--you are greater and better, and it is your very affection which makes you reproach yourself. But let us speak again--calmly, seriously--of what I proposed. You want occupation--you want play for your noble powers; here, darling, you are like a bird in a golden cage. Let me persuade you to try your wings again, to end this dreary existence. I can easily arrange everything for your return to the profession.’ She shook her head sadly. ‘Never! never!’ ‘But why?’ ‘Have I not told you? Because I prefer to remain alone with _you_.’ He pressed her still, suspecting that her determination was caused by solicitude on his account, or some secret fear of compromising him; but when he saw that she was firm he was pleased. In the secresy of his own mind he rather dreaded the step that he proposed; lest that step, if taken, might draw them further asunder, and in more than one way lead to misconstruction. He was far too little of a Philistine to despise the theatre, to undervalue a beautiful and much-neglected art; but he knew its decadence, and understood its baser ambitions. He preferred to keep the woman he loved to himself, to screen her from the contamination of mercenary speculators and the coarse admiration of the dregs of the public which unhappily fill our theatres. The excitements of the stage, he thought, were not beneficial to a nature so overwrought as that of his wife; its _morale_ was not edifying, its literature not spiritually ennobling, its successes were evanescent, its rewards too often achieved by ignoble means. All this he thought, yet did not say, for he honestly set his wife’s personal happiness above all considerations of prejudice; but when he heard her emphatic determination, a weight was taken from his mind. So the interview ended, bringing the husband and wife more closely and tenderly together, but still leaving on the woman’s heart the sense of a nameless dread, which she dared not utter, and which he, of course, did not understand. CHAPTER XXXIII.--OLD JOURNALISM--AND NEW. Calling at Sutherland’s rooms one morning, Crieff found him surrounded by a number of unwieldy volumes, dirty and dingy enough to have been picked up, as indeed they had been, in the uncleanest shop in Holywell Street. One of these volumes he was examining with considerable impatience when Crieff entered. ‘What have you got there?’ asked the journalist, peeping over his shoulder. ‘As I live, an old volume of the “Satyrnine Review.”’