hardly have suspected this burly, boyish, exuberant man of thirty of so much delicacy of feeling and tenderness as he had shown in this interview with his wife.
“We do not repine, my love, for their loss,” he repeated.
“I am sometimes very lonely, John,” she hesitatingly said. “Our little Mary was growing just old enough to be a companion to me; and John too, — I do not know which I loved best.”
“I must find you,” said Brightly, in his cheerful tone, “a nice little maiden or a fine little fellow to adopt.”
“O if you would!” she exclaimed.
“Which shall it be?” he asked with a business air. He occupied himself in erasing with his breath the picture which had recalled their bereavement.
As the frost vanished, the scenery without appeared. No very vast or very attractive view. Most of the respectable citizens of New York have similar landscape privileges. Brightly’s bedroom window was perforated in the front of a handsome precipice of brown freestone. It looked down upon a snowy ravine, planted alternately with lamp-posts and ailanthus-trees; opposite was another long precipice of brown stone, evidently excavated into dwellings for the better class of troglodytes.
“Are you serious, John?” asked Mrs. Brightly, drying her tears.
