"No," I said, "I don't mean it," for his husky, troubled voice brought me to my senses. "All I mean is, that I love you so dearly, and you keep my heart feeling so hungry and restless; and then you went and brought your father and sister here and never asked me if I should like it; and you crowded mother out, and she lives all alone, and it isn't right! I always said that whoever married me had got to marry mother, and I never dreamed that you would disappoint me so!"
"Will you stop crying, and listen to me?" he said.
But I could not stop. The floods of the great deep were broken up at last, and I had to cry. If I could have told my troubles to some one I could thus have found vent for them, but there was no one to whom I had a right to speak of my husband.
Ernest walked up and down in silence. Oh, if I could have cried on his breast, and felt that he loved and pitied me!
At last, as I grew quieter, he came and sat by me.
"This has come upon me like a thunderclap," he said. "I did not know I kept your heart hungry. I did not know you wished your mother to live with us. And I took it for granted that my wife, with her high-toned, heroic character, would sustain me in every duty, and welcome my father and sister to our home. I do not know what I can do now. Shall I send them away?"
"No, no!" I cried. "Only be good to me, Ernest, only love me, only look at me with your own eyes, and not with other people's. You knew I had faults when you married me; I never tried to conceal them."
"And did you fancy I had none myself?" he asked.
"No," I replied. "I saw no faults in you. Everybody said you were such a noble, good man and you spoke so beautifully one night at an evening meeting."
"Speaking beautifully is little to the purpose less one lives beautifully," he said, sadly. "And now is it possible that you and I, a Christian man and a Christian woman, are going on and on with scenes as this? Are you to wear your very life out because I have not your frantic way of loving, and am I to be made weary of mine because I cannot satisfy you?"