CHAPTER 8.
_"Down, pale ghost! What doest thou here?
The sky is cloudless overhead, The stream runs clear._ _"I drowned thee, ghost, In a river of bitter brine: With whatever face thou risest up, Meet thou not mine!_ _"Back, poor ghost! Dead of thy own decay Let the dead bury their dead! I go my way."_ While she was dressing for it, the evening party ceased to be terrible even in Christian's imagination.

She kept thinking over and over the talk she had had with Dr.Grey; what he had said, and what she had said, of which she was a little ashamed that her impetuous impulse had faded.

Yet why?
Why should she not speak out her heart to her own husband?
It began to be less difficult to do; for, though he did not answer much, he never misunderstood her, never responded with those sharp, cold, altogether wide-of-the-mark observations which, in talking with Miss Gascoigne or Miss Grey, made her feel that they and she looked at things from points of view as opposite as the poles.
"They can't help that; neither, I am sure, can I," she often thought.
And yet how, thus diverse, they should all live under the same roof together for months and years to come, was more than Christian could conceive.
Besides, now, she had at times a new feeling--a wish to have her husband all to herself.

She ceased to need the "shadowy third"-- the invisible barricade against total dual solitude made by aunts or children.
She would have been glad sometimes to send them all away, and spend a quiet evening hour, such as the last one, alone with Dr.Grey.

It was so pleasant to talk to him--so comfortable.