The Story Continued by Marian Halcombe

wealth! Oh, Marian, never laugh again. Thank God for your poverty⁠—it has made you your own mistress, and has saved you from the lot that has fallen on me .” A sad beginning on the lips of a young wife!⁠—sad in its quiet plainspoken truth. The few days we had all passed together at Blackwater Park had been many enough to show me⁠—to show anyone⁠—what her husband had married her for. “You shall not be distressed,” she said, “by hearing how soon my disappointments and my trials began⁠—or even by knowing what they were. It is bad enough to have them on my memory. If I tell you how he received the first and last attempt at remonstrance that I ever made, you will know how he has always treated me, as well as if I had described it in so many words. It was one day at Rome when we had ridden out together to the tomb of Cecilia Metella. The sky was calm and lovely, and the grand old ruin looked beautiful, and the remembrance that a husband’s love had raised it in the old time to a wife’s memory, made me feel more tenderly and more anxiously towards my husband than I had ever felt yet. ‘Would you build such a tomb for me , Percival?’ I asked him. ‘You said you loved me dearly before we were married, and yet, since that time⁠—’ I could get no farther. Marian! he was not even looking at me! I pulled down my veil, thinking it best not to let him see that the tears were in my eyes. I fancied he had not paid any attention to me, but he had. He said, ‘Come away,’ and laughed to himself as he helped me on to my horse. He mounted his own horse and laughed again as we rode away. ‘If I do build you a tomb,’ he said, ‘it will be done with your own money. I wonder whether Cecilia Metella