When he realized he was to be denied children as well as “home pleasure,” he looked about him and made do with what he found. Had he been given to depression, he might have despaired at the chancy improvisations and half measures he was forced to, but being a cheerful man, he made a virtue of the impromptu and woke each day with feelings of anticipation and adventure. If he accepted, as he did, Nell’s declaration of delicate health, so she also accepted, with eyes open and willfully blind, his minor and major infidelities. A mating, if such it may be called, begun as a convenience to both, continued and endured as one. They were in their way perfectly loyal. Neither would hear a word against the other, and in time their very thoughts agreed with their public behavior.

“Well, Nellie,” Deborah exclaimed, as the carriage she had watched all the way up the front road rolled to a stop at the door, “you’re here at last. I expected you earlier.”

“I woke feeling so poorly I despaired of coming at all, except that I wouldn’t disappoint Felix.” Nell sat still with her eyes nearly closed and her hands drooping in her lap, as Felix hopped out of the carriage and gave his sister-in-law a hug. Laughing, he trotted past her into the house, calling back, “Where is Arnold? Out with the hands, is he?”

Deborah helped Nell down from her seat as Plumboy, a skinny, grinning child who worked in the stables, held the horses until the lady had got out of the carriage and he could guide it around the house to the barn where the horses would be unhitched and attended to.

“How are you, Deborah?” Nell asked plaintively as she allowed herself to be guided up the steps onto the porch.

“Entirely fit,” Deborah said, “as I am happy to see you are too.”

Nell smiled forgivingly. “Would it were so. But we must all, I tell myself, bow to God’s will.”

“Fiddle, Nellie. You’re as strong as a team of oxen.”

Their mutual greeting accomplished, and it varied little from one time to the next, they linked arms and entered the long hall, turning left into the room that would take them upstairs to the front bedroom habitually used by Nell and Felix. As they climbed, they heard from the kitchen wing a chorus of laughter, then Lovey’s voice raised in fierce complaint: “Mister Felix, I told you, I told you, I tell you again—keep your hands in your pockets and your pockets tucked inside your trousers! You, Buttercup, hush that giggling and catch little Selma before she falls! Am I the only one with eyes?”

Unheeding as if unhearing, Nell glided up the winding stairs, Deborah following.

8