neighbors!— Why did I ever come to live in this place, among such a set of people?" And that would be the last move; for Captain Christy, knowing the neighborhood opinion on this very point, had never found the heart to answer. Thus the game would end in a kind of stale-mate.
"It ain't worth arguin'," he sighed.
"Of course not," snapped his wife. "It's only a question of my peace and health, or your idle pleasure."
And therefore, through another week of dreary weather, among her vials, and beside window-panes laced with raindrops or blanketed with white fog, she sat and argued sourly.
To know the forgotten, obliterated motives which, in that other world of the past, had joined these two in mutual captivity, would be to read tablets long expunged, to trace beach-wandering footprints after many tides, to restore the drifted volutes in last winter's snow. "How did he marry her?" was an old question of indignant, amused, or speculative neighbors; with no more answer than neigh-
