seal with a smile

To the wife there was nothing strange in finding her husband sleeping the sleep of the tired worker before the dying fire. Her eyes had a laughing tenderness in them, a sparkle of mischief, as she set down the candle and moved across the room. Her feet touched something that rolled under her dress. She stooped, and  as she picked up an empty glass.

“James—”

There was mirth in the voice, but her eyes showed a puzzled intentness as she noticed the things that stood beside the lamp upon the table. An open cigar-box, a tray full of crumbled ash and blackened matches, a couple of empty syphons, a decanter standing in an ooze of spilled spirit. Memory prompted her, and she smiled at the suggestion. Porteus Carmagee, that prattling, white-bobbed maker of wills and codicils had slipped in for a smoke and a gossip. James Murchison never touched alcohol, and the inference was obvious enough, for her experience of Mr. Carmagee’s loquacity justified her in concluding that he had droned her husband to sleep.

Wifely mischief was in the ascendant on the instant. She stooped over the sleeping man whose face was in the shadow, put her lips close to his, and drew back with a little catching of the breath. The room seemed to grow dark and very cold of a sudden. She straightened, and stood rigid, staring across the room with a sense of hurrying at the heart.

Then, as though compelling herself, she lifted the lamp, and held it so that the light fell full upon her husband’s face.
CHAPTER II
Man is the heir of many ancestors, and his inheritance of life’s estate may prove cumbered by mortgages unredeemed by earlier generations.

In the spring of the year the blood is hot, and the quicksilver of youth burns in the brain. The poise of true manhood is not reached at twenty, the experience to know, the strength to grapple. James Murchison of the broad back and sunny face, first of good fellows, popular among all, had followed the joy of being and feeling even into shady back-street rooms. In the hospital “common-room” he had always had a knot of youngsters round him, lounging, smoking, lads with no studied vice in them, but lads to whom life was a thing of zest. For Murchison it had been the crest of the wave, the day of the world’s youth. An orphan with money at his bank, the liberty of London calling him, a dozen mad youngsters to form a coterie! As for heredity and such doctrines of man’s ascent and fall, he had not studied them in the thing he called himself with her, he would sanction everything at oncehe answered..