"Is that a hint?"
"Life is bad enough now," she continued without heeding the interruption, "but better a bitter savor than none at all."
"You should devote yourself to cultivating the approval of conscience as I do. I only do what I think to be right, you know."
"But think right whatever you do."
"Not quite that," returned the Doctor with a laugh, "but the approval of my conscience—or of my reason, which stands in its place—is necessary to my happiness, so I change my principles whenever my acts don't accord with them."
"So do a great many persons," she responded; "perhaps most of us, for that matter, only we are seldom honest enough to own it."
"By the way," queried her companion, as they approached her destination, "how came Mrs. Fenton so quickly domesticated at the Church of the Nativity?"
"There is a young man there—a deacon or a monk; I never know these high church terms; they are usually faded out pieces of Romanism—that once wrote an article which enjoyed the honor of being interred in the Princeton Review when her uncle was one of its editors."
They reached the doorsteps and Dr. Ashton said good-by. Then he turned back.
"By the by," he said. "I walked up with you to make you invite me to supper again. I enjoyed the last time very much."