WEIGHING DELIGHT AND DOLE.
Hamlet; i.—2.

Dr. Ashton came in too full of his own interview with Arthur to notice particularly if his wife showed signs of agitation.

"My dear," he said, throwing himself into a chair, "it is at once one of the latest and the wisest of my reflections that you had better consider a newly married man as an entire stranger and form his acquaintance quite from the foundation, wholly unbiased by any notion you had of him as a bachelor."

"His wife," responded Helen quietly, "has been dining with me, so I understand something of the situation. But how did Arthur behave?"

"Like any husband who does not care to quarrel with his wife even when he disapproves of her. It is upon that principle that matrimonial felicity depends. Do you say Mrs. Fenton has been here?"

"Yes; she came to me for sympathy and I administered it by telling her that I am your wife."

"The devil! I beg your pardon; but, Helen, it was precisely because I knew she was sure to remember this Frontier scrape that I wanted her not to know. She will be very hard on you."

"Christianity is always hard," returned she; "but what difference does it make; it was only a question of time. She is sweet and pure and good, Will, but her religion holds her in bands stronger than steel. I couldn't long keep step with one in chains. It might as well come now as any time."

Her husband looked at her with evident interest not unmixed with admiration.

"She provokes me to do and to say childish things," Helen continued, "just to shock her. I told her bluntly the other day that I had been telling a falsehood, and she had the impertinence to look shocked. I am not sure that I did not go so far as to say I 'lied,' a word that hardly holds the place in English that it did in the good days of Mrs. Opie. She would have been reconciled if I had said I told what I hoped was true."

"I should have told her," laughed Dr. Ashton, "that I only used truth as the Egyptians used straw in bricks, the smallest possible quantity that will hold the rest together."

"I cannot see why Arthur married her," Helen said musingly.

"Oh, as to that, an idle man will fall in love with any pretty woman who will snub him."

"But Arthur isn't idle, and she doesn't snub him."

"Very well; he married her because he fell in love for no reason but the weakness of our sex."

"Love seems generally to be regarded by the masculine mind in the light of a weakness."

"Isn't it?" her husband returned. "Love is the condition of desiring the impossible, and if that is not a weakness, what becomes of logic?"

"I am tired of logic," she said, rising abruptly. "I am tired of every thing. Let us have supper. I want a glass of wine. I am sure I tried to be kind to Mrs. Fenton. I would have helped her if I could; but how could I assist her unless she chose to let me, and that, too, knowing who I am."

"I never knew you to be other than kind," was the grave reply, which brought to Helen's cheek a faint flush of pleasure.

The servant came in with supper, and the slender glasses were filled with Rhine wine.

"I could not help thinking," Dr. Ashton said, lifting his glass,—"I drink to your very good health, my dear—I could not help thinking of my wedding gift to Arthur, that he asked me for it, I mean."

"I thought of it, too, when his wife told me the story. It is well she does not know that of you."

"Oh, it wouldn't matter," he said carelessly. "She couldn't feel a greater horror of me than she does already. Do you see the mark of Cain on my forehead, Helen?"

"Isn't it droll," she returned, with a smile half pensive, half humorous, "to feel ourselves suddenly tried by new standards and found so wanting. I am not sure but dramatic propriety demands that I should poison Mrs. Fenton. I have that vial, you know."

"Did you notice the inscription on the vial?"

"No; is there one?"

"See for yourself," he answered, refilling his glass.

She rose from the table and brought from a small cabinet the morocco case, unopened since Arthur had given it to her. A certain dread and distaste had prevented her examining it. Now she sat down again in her place, a beautiful woman, with the light falling upon her from above, shining upon her golden hair, and bringing out the hues of her sea-blue dress. Her husband watched her as she held the case a moment in her delicate, firm fingers before unclasping it. He had learned within these last weeks that his old love for Helen had re-awakened; or more truly that a new affection had been born. The knowledge had come to him through thinking upon the relations between Helen and Arthur and in speculating concerning her feeling for Grant Herman, and it had been in his mind when he described love as the desire for the impossible. He had determined to speak his passion, but as he looked at his wife sitting within arm's length yet as remote as if half the world lay between them, he hesitated. Helen unclasped the case and lifted the tiny cut-glass vial from its velvet bed.

"How extravagant you were in your vial," she said, involuntarily lifting it to her nostrils.

"Don't!" Dr. Ashton exclaimed, leaning forward suddenly.

"Is it so deadly as that!" she asked in some dismay, holding it off.

"It is simply pure prussic acid," he replied. "But it might be loosely stopped."

She examined carefully the minute writing engraved upon the glass.

"'Death foils the gods,'" she read. "Is it one of your own wickednesses, Will?" "I don't know. By the way, we might send it to Mrs. Fenton now as a souvenir of the two desirable acquaintances she has lost."

"What a brood of vipers she must think us, Will. I think it is pathetic, probably; but I cannot help being amused. It is rather an odd sensation to find that instead of being the harmless, insignificant body I have always supposed, I am really a hardened and abandoned reprobate."

"Oh, I've always known it, but I did not tell you for fear of destroying your peace of mind."

"I'm afraid," sighed Helen, rather absently, "that—if you don't mind the slang—Arthur has an elephant on his hands."

"Yes," assented the other, "himself."

She laughed musically, toying with the little cut-glass vial.

"How familiarity takes away the dread of any thing," she remarked. "We become accustomed to any thing; and, while I dare say it is the shallowest of sophistry, that ought to be an argument in favor of the theory that vice and fearfulness are alike only strangeness."

"That is rather a sophistical bit of logic; so perfectly so that it ought to be theology. Excuse me, but could you let me have a morsel of cheese."

"There does not seem to be any for you to have," she said, glancing over the table.

"Isn't there," returned he, as carelessly as if he had not noted that fact. "It is of no consequence."

"Oh, I can easily get it; I suppose Hannah forgot it."

She restored the vial to its place, laying the closed case by her plate, and left the room. The instant the door closed behind her, Dr. Ashton reached across the table, possessed himself of the vial, returning the case to its former position. His wife turned just outside the door, and came back with a meaning smile to take up the empty case and lock it again in the cabinet.

"I cannot trust you," she remarked with a smile; "you are too eager to foil the gods."

He smiled in return, holding his wine-glass up to the light.

"There is more where that came from," he said. "You forget my profession."

"Of what are you musing so intently?" Helen queried, half an hour later, while, the supper being ended, her husband was enjoying his cigar.

"Of two things which I have to communicate. One is a folly and the other—or perhaps I should say each—is a misfortune."

"The folly," returned she, "I forgive; the misfortune I regret. What are they?" "I am glad you forgive the folly. That gives me boldness to tell it. I have fallen in love."

"You, Will! With whom?"

"That is the madness of it. With my wife."

"Will!"

"It is the truth," he went on, half whimsically, but with a certain ring of earnestness in his tone. "I acknowledge the madness, the poor taste of a man's falling in love with his own wife, but the fact stubbornly remains. I have been in love with you for a long time, but I stood back for Arthur like a good fellow."

"I never was in love with Arthur," she interrupted.

"It is no matter," he continued. "The question is, can't you get up a grain of grace for me, old lady?"

He leaned over the table, his dark eyes shining as she had never seen them before. She was fascinated by his gaze; she felt as if the ground were slipping from beneath her feet, and as though he were casting upon her an evil spell. A wave of despair swept over her. Must she again submit to his power; were the old days of bitter bondage to return; was she nothing but a puppet to his will?

In this extremity a memory saved her. Unable to withdraw her gaze from her husband's face, there came to her suddenly the look in the eyes of Grant Herman that day when he told her his love. The blood surged to her cheeks, but her calmness returned.

"It is of no use, Will," she said with gentle firmness. "All that is past forever between us. We had better not speak of it," she added wistfully. "I have so few friends that I cannot bear to lose any one of them."

"My folly is then my misfortune," he responded, with no appearance of diminished good humor. "It is the pleasure of the gods to torment me; I suppose it amuses them. The old Romans were only aping them in their blood-thirsty sports, and I fancy that is the secret of their deification, for nothing seems so much to the liking of the gods as to torment humanity."

The evident endeavor which the speaker made to appear flippant and at his ease showed her how deeply he was moved. His wife felt this without fully reasoning it out, and the consciousness that this self-controlled man was so stirred awoke in her a strange and powerful excitement. She turned a shade paler, as she looked silently down into her wine-glass. Her own life had been too sad for her not to feel some emotion at his words. She strove to repress the thoughts which made her bosom swell and heave, yet it was from them her words came when she broke the silence.

"It is bitterest to find one's self mistaken. To find that our gods are only clay like the rest of humanity. I could forgive a friend for neglect, abuse or any cruelty; but I could never forgive him for falling below my ideal of him."

"You do not mean me," he returned placidly, "for of me you never had an ideal; but waiving that for a moment, I should like to tell you of my second misfortune—if it isn't to be reckoned a blessing."

She looked at him without speaking. If this disclosure were but a repetition in varied form of the other, she had no wish to help him put it into words. Yet even as this thought passed through her mind, she fancied she had detected in his tone some new gravity.

"I've discovered," continued Dr. Ashton, with the same light manner he had used throughout the interview, "that I have a cancer gayly but with grim persistency developing under my arm."

"Oh, Will," Helen cried, clasping her hands, "you are not in earnest!"

"I assure you it is a very earnest matter with me, and has been for some time. I might have an operation, I suppose, if it were worth while; though it is so near the heart that it would be uncomfortably risky."

Helen became suddenly calm. The color faded slowly from her cheeks, and her husband, watching her narrowly, saw her beautiful lips assume a new expression of firmness and determination. She unconsciously lifted her head into a more erect carnage. Her eyes were moist and full of feeling. Slowly in her mind formed a resolve, and with a full knowledge of the renunciation of self which it involved, she called up all the nobility of her soul to aid her in living up to it. Creeds were little to this woman, yet her life was formed upon the principles which give to creeds their stability, and by which the moral is removed from the animal.

"Will," she at length said, slowly and gravely, "could it not be arranged for me to live with you? You did not tell me you were fond of me without having thought out the possibilities."

"I should have hesitated to ask so much," was his reply, "even of your love; I shall certainly not take it of your pity."

"My pity?" she murmured, not raising her eyes. "What do you mean?"

"You know. You cannot think me so dull as not to see that your proffer comes not from affection, but from generosity. I thank you, but I will accept no sacrifices."

He rose as he spoke, and put out his hand.

"I must be going," he said in an indifferent tone. "I have letters to write that must be mailed by midnight. I am not more than half as bad, Helen, as you have always persisted in thinking. I never made very profound pretensions, but I've treated every body squarely from my own point of view. If they have regarded my blessings as curses, it wasn't my fault, and I am not sufficiently hypocritical to pretend that I think it was. Good night."

He gave her hand a warmer and more lingering pressure than usual.

"I've had a very pleasant evening," he added, "despite the admixture of truth. Young people don't like any bitters, but we old, shattered wrecks need a dash of it in the wine of life to help digestion. Good night."