Hugh thought his Wee Wifie was tired, and tried to coax her to go to sleep; he brought her another cushion, and attended to the fire, and then went away to leave her to her nap. Fay would rather have had him stay and talk to her, but she was too unselfish to say so; she lay in her pretty room watching the fire-light play on the walls, and thinking first of her husband and then of Margaret. She longed with a vague wistfulness that she were more like that lovely Miss Ferrers, and then, perhaps, Hugh would care to talk to her. Were the creeping shadows bringing her strange thoughts? Fay could not have told any one why there were tears on her cheeks; was the consciousness beginning to dawn upon her that she was not close enough to her husband's heart?--that she was his pet, but not his friend--that other wives whom she knew were not kept outside in the cold? "I am not too young to understand, if Hugh would only think so," she said to herself plaintively. "How could I be, when I love him so?" When Sir Hugh returned to the room an hour later, he was sorry to see Fay look so flushed and weary. "We shall have you ill after all this," he said, reproachfully; "why have you not been a good child and gone to sleep as I told you?" "Because I was troubling too much. Oh, Hugh!" clasping him round the neck, and her little hands felt hot and dry, "are you sure that you are not angry with me, and that you really love me?" "Of course I am not angry with you," in a jesting tone. "What an absurd idea, Wee Wifie." "I like you to call me that," she answered, thoughtfully, drawing down one of his hands and laying her cheek on it; and Hugh thought as Margaret had, what a baby face it was. "I mean to grow older, Hugh, and wiser too if I can; but you must be patient with me, dear. I know I can not be all you want just at present--I am only Wee Wifie now." "Well, I do not wish to change her," replied Sir Hugh, with a touch of real tenderness in his voice, and then very gently he unloosed the clinging arms. Somehow Fay's voice and look haunted him as he went down-stairs. "She is a dear little thing," he said to himself, as he sat in his library sorting his papers; "I wish I were a better husband to her," and then he wondered what Margaret had thought of his Wee Wifie. CHAPTER XVIII. ERLE'S VISIT TO THE GRANGE. He gazed--he saw--he knew the face Of beauty and the form of grace. BYRON.