How Philip in Wrath, Daisy in Anguish, Fly Their Home.

"You are, then, not even a gentleman!"

The ungracious words came almost unbidden from Daisy\'s pallid lips, as husband and wife for the first time faced each other in anger. She could not help it. Passive, patient, long-suffering she had been the while the mortifications and slights were for herself. But it was beyond the strength of her control to sit quietly by when Mr. Stewart was also affronted.

Through all the years of her life she had been either so happy in her first home, or so silently loyal to duty in her second, that no one had discovered in Daisy the existence of a strong spirit. Sweet-tempered, acquiescent, gentle, every one had known her alike in joy or under the burden of disappointment and disillusion. "As docile as Daisy" might have been a proverb in the neighborhood, so general was this view of her nature. Least of all did the selfish, surly-tempered, wilful young Englishman who was her husband, and who had ridden rough-shod over her tender thoughts and dreams these two years, suspect that she had in her the capabilities of flaming, wrathful resistance.

He stared at her now, at first in utter bewilderment, then with the instinct of combat in his scowl.

"Be careful what you say!" he answered, sharply. "I am in no mood for folly."

"Nay, mood or no mood, I shall speak. Too long have I held my peace. You should be ashamed in every recess of your heart for what you have said and done this day!" She spoke with a vibrant fervency of feeling which for the moment pierced even his thick skin.

"He was over-hasty," he muttered, in half-apology. "What I said was for his interest. I intended no offence."

"Will you follow him, and say so?"

"Certainly not! If he chooses to take umbrage, let him. It\'s no affair of mine."

"Then I will go--and not return until he comes with me, invited by you!"

The woman\'s figure, scornfully erect, trembled with the excitement of the position she had on the moment assumed; but her beautiful face, refined and spiritualized of late by the imprint of womanhood\'s saddening wisdom, was coldly resolute. By contrast with the burly form and red, rough countenance of the man she confronted, she seemed made of another clay.

"Yes, I will go!" she went on, hurriedly. "This last is too much! It is not fit that I should keep up the pretence longer."

The husband burst out with a rude and somewhat hollow laugh. "Pretence, you say! Nay, madam, you miscall it. A pretence is a thing that deceives, and I have never been deceived. Do not flatter yourself. I have read you like a page of large print, these twenty months. Like the old gaffer whose feathers I ruffled here a while ago with a few words of truth, your tongue has been here, but your thoughts have been with the Dutchman in Albany!"

The poor girl flushed and recoiled under the coarse insult, and the words did not come readily with which to repel it.

"I know not how to answer insolence of this kind," she said, at last. "I have been badly reared for such purposes."

She felt her calmness deserting her as she spoke; her eyes began to burn with the starting tears. This crisis in her life had sprung into being with such terrible swiftness, and yawned before her now, as reflection came, with such blackness of unknown consequences, that her woman\'s strength quaked and wavered. The tears found their way to her cheeks now, and through them she saw, not the heavy, half-drunken young husband, but the handsome, slender, soft-voiced younger lover of three years ago. And then the softness came to her voice too.

"How can you be so cruel and coarse, Philip, so unworthy of your real self?" She spoke despairingly, not able wholly to believe that the old self was the true self, yet clinging, woman-like, to the hope that she was mistaken.

"Ha! So my lady has thought better of going, has she?"

"Why should you find pleasure in seeking to make this home impossible for me, Philip?" she asked, in grave gentleness of appeal.

"I thought you would change your tune," he sneered back at her, throwing himself into a chair. "I have a bit of counsel for you. Do not venture upon that tone with me again. It serves with Dutch husbands, no doubt; but I am not Dutch, and I don\'t like it."

She stood for what seemed to be a long time, unoccupied and irresolute, in the centre of the room. It was almost impossible for her to think clearly or to see what she ought to do. She had spoken in haste about leaving the house, and felt now that that would be an unwise and wrongful step to take. Yet her husband had deliberately insulted her, and had coldly interpreted as weak withdrawals her conciliatory words, and it was very hard to let this state of affairs stand without some attempt at its improvement. Her pride tugged bitterly against the notion of addressing him again, yet was it not right that she should do so?

The idea occurred to her of ringing for a servant and directing him to draw off his master\'s boots. The slave-boy who came in was informed by a motion of her finger, and, kneeling to the task, essayed to lift one of the heavy boots from the tiled hearth. The amiable Mr. Cross allowed the foot to be raised into the boy\'s lap. Then he kicked the lad backward, head over heels, with it, and snapped out angrily:

"Get away! When I want you, I\'ll call!"

The slave scrambled to his feet and slunk out of the room. The master sat in silence, moodily sprawled out before the fire. At last the wife approached him, and stood at the back of his chair.

"You are no happier than I am, Philip," she said. "Surely there must be some better way to live than this. Can we not find it, and spare ourselves all this misery?"

"What misery?" he growled. "There is none that I know, save the misery of having a wife who hates everything her husband does. The weather-cock on the roof has more sympathy with my purposes and aims than you have. At least once in a while he points my way."

"Wherein have I failed? When have you ever temperately tried to set me aright, seeing my errors?"

"There it is--the plausible tongue always. \'When have I done this, or that, or the other?\' It is not one thing that has been done, madam, but ten thousand left undone! What did I need--having lands, money, position--to make me the chief gentleman of Tryon County, and this house of mine the foremost mansion west of Albany, once Sir William was dead? Naught but a wife who should share my ambitions, enter into my plans, gladly help to further my ends! I choose for this a wife with a pretty face, a pretty manner, a tidy figure which carries borrowed satins gracefully enough--as I fancy, a wife who will bring sympathy and distinction as well as beauty. Well, I was a fool! This precious wife of mine is a Puritan ghost who gazes gloomily at me when we are alone, and chills my friends to the marrow when they are ill-advised enough to visit me. She looks at the wine I lift to my lips, and it sours in the glass. She looks into my kennels, and it is as if turpentine had been rubbed on the hounds\' snouts. This great house of mine, which ought of right to be the gallant centre of Valley life and gayety, stands up here, by God! Like a deserted churchyard. Men avoid it as if a regicide had died here. I might have been Sir Philip before this, and had his Majesty\'s commission in my pocket, but for this petticoated skeleton which warns off pleasure and promotion. And then she whines, \'What have I done?\'"

"You are clever enough, Philip, to have been anything you wanted to be, if only you had started with more heart and less appetite for pleasure. It is not your wife, but your wine, that you should blame."

"Ay, there it comes! And even if it were true--as it is not, for I am as temperate as another--it would be you who had driven me to it."

"What folly!"

"Folly, madam? By Heaven, I will not--"

"Nay, listen to me, Philip, for the once. We may not speak thus frankly again; it would have be............