for infinite joy. He compared her in his mind to Catherine Bailey, and could not but feel that in his youth he had been blind and fatuous. Catherine had been a fair-haired girl, and had now blossomed out into the anxious mother of ten fair-haired children. The anxiety had no doubt come from the evil courses of her husband. Had she been contented to be Mrs Whittlestaff, there might have been no such look of care, and there might perhaps have been less than ten children; but she would still have been fair-haired, blowsy, and fat. Mr Whittlestaff had with infinite trouble found an opportunity of seeing her and her flock, unseen by them, and a portion of his agony had subsided. But still there was the fact that she had promised to be his, and had become a thing sacred in his sight, and had then given herself up to the arms of Mr Compas. But now if Mary Lawrie would but accept him, how blessed might be the evening of his life!

He had confessed to himself often enough how sad and dreary he was in his desolate life. He had told himself that it must be so for the remainder of all time to him, when Catherine Bailey had declared her purpose to him of marrying the successful young lawyer. He had at once made up his mind that his doom was fixed, and had not regarded his solitude as any deep aggravation of his sorrow. But he had come by degrees to find that a man should not give up his life because of a fickle girl, and especially when he found her to be the mother of ten flaxen haired infants. He had, too, as he declared to himself, waited long enough.

But Mary Lawrie was very different from Catherine Bailey. The Catherine he had known had been bright, and plump, and joyous, with a quick good-natured wit, and a rippling laughter, which by its silvery sound had robbed him of his heart. There was no plumpness, and no silver-sounding laughter with Mary. She shall be described in the next chapter. Let it suffice to say here that she was somewhat staid in her demeanour, and not at all given to putting herself forward in conversation. But every hour that he passed in her company he became more and more sure that, if any wife could now make him happy, this was the woman who could do so.

But of her manner to himself he doubted much. She was gratitude itself for what he was prepared to do for her. But with her gratitude was mingled respect, and almost veneration. She treated him at first almost as a servant,—at any rate with none of the familiarity of a friend, and hardly with the reserve of a grown-up child. Gradually, in obedience to his evident wishes, she did drop her reserve, and allowed herself to converse with him; but 

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