And he sung a snatch of the familiar song—"There's no place like home," rising, as he did so, from the table, and offering Irene his arm. She could do no less than accept the courtesy, and so they went up to their cozy sitting-room arm-in-arm—he chatty, and she almost silent.
"What's the matter, petty?" he asked, in a fond way, after trying for some time, but in vain, to draw her out into pleasant conversation. "Ain't you well to-night?"
Now, so far as her bodily state was concerned, Irene never felt better in her life. So she could not plead indisposition.
"I feel well," she replied, glancing up into her husband's face in a cold, embarrassed kind of way.
"Then your looks belie your condition—that's all. If it isn't the body, it must be the mind. What's gone wrong, darling?"
The tenderness in Hartley's tones was genuine, and the heart of Irene leaped to his voice with a responsive throe. But was he not her master and tyrant? How that thought chilled the sweet impulse!
"Nothing wrong," she answered, with a sadness of tone which she was unable to conceal. "But I feel dull, and cannot help it."
"You should have gone with me to laugh with Matthews. He would have shaken all these cobwebs from your brain. Come! it is not yet too late."
But the rebel spirit was in her heart; and to have acceded to he husband's wishes would have been to submit herself to control.
"You must excuse me," she replied. "I feel as if home were the better place for me to-night."