"My recommendation is," continued Luke, "that you rest your thoughts on what you have, not on what you have not. And you have much to be thankful for. You have a wife whom you love dearly, and who loves you no less devotedly. You are your own master, living on your own estate, and in your own manor house. So—live for that, care for that, cultivate your own soil, and your own family happiness, and let the rest go packing."
"My own house! my own land!" exclaimed Anthony. "These are fine words, but they are false. Willsworthy is not mine, it belongs to Urith."
"Anthony!" cried his wife, "what is mine you know is yours—wholly, freely."
"Well," said Luke, with heat, "and if Hall had been yours when you took Urith, it would have been no longer mine or thine, but ours. So it is with Willsworthy. Love is proud to receive and to give, and it never reckons what it gives as enough, and accepts what it receives as wholly its own."
Anthony shrugged his shoulders, then set his elbows on the table, and put his head in his hands.
"I reckon it is natural that I should grieve over the alienation from my father."
"You are not grieving over it because it is an alienation from your father, but from Hall, with the comforts and luxuries to which you were accustomed there."
"Do you not see," exclaimed Anthony, impatiently, "that it is I who should support my wife, and not my wife who should find me in bread and butter? Our proper positions are reversed."
"Not at all. Willsworthy has gone to rack and ruin, and if it be brought back to prosperity, it will be through your energy and hard work."