he is positively learning to dislike me? To shrink from me with that strong
repulsion which women feel toward some men? Oh! If that is true, the case is
hopeless; it would kill me. Every effort to win him, even the most delicate
and unobtrusive, would only drive him farther away; the deepest instincts of
his soul would lead him to withdraw--to shun me. If this is true, the time
may come when, so far from my filling his house with comfort, I shall make him
dread to enter it. Oh, oh! My only course is to remember just what I
promised and he expected when he married me, and live up to that."

Thus husband and wife reached the same, conclusion and were rendered equally
unhappy.


Chapter XXX. Holcroft's Best Hope

When Holcroft came in to dinner that day the view he had adopted was
confirmed, yet Alida's manner and appearance began to trouble him. Even to
his rather slow perception, she did not seem so happy as she had been. She
did not meet his eye with her old frank, friendly, and as he had almost hoped,
affectionate, expression; she seemed merely feverishly anxious to do
everything and have all as he wished. Instead of acting with natural ease and
saying what was in her mind without premeditation, a conscious effort was
visible and an apparent solicitude that he should be satisfied. The
inevitable result was that he was more dissatisfied. "She's doing her best for
me," he growled, as he went back to his work, "and it begins to look as if it
might wear her out in time. Confound it! Having everything just so isn't of
much account when a man's heart-hungry. I'd rather have had one of her old
smiles and gone without my dinner. Well, well; how little a man understands
himself or knows the future! The day I married her I was in mortal dread lest
she should care for me too much and want to be affectionate and all that; and