r brother-in-law should engage a lady
housekeeper, and the luckless James Tapster had even interviewed several
applicants for the post after they had been chosen--sifted out, as it
were--by Maud. Unfortunately, they had all been more or less of his own
age, and plain, very plain; while he, naturally enough, would have
preferred to see something young and pretty about him again.

It was over this housekeeper question that he had at last escaped from
Maud's domestic thraldom; for his sister-in-law, offended by his
rejection of each of her candidates, had declared that she would take no
more trouble about his household affairs! Nay, more, she had reminded
him with a smile that she had honestly tried to make pleasant, that
there is, after all, no fool like an old fool--about women. This
insinuation had made Mr. Tapster very angry, and straightway he had
engaged a respectable cook-housekeeper, and, although he had soon become
aware that the woman was feathering her own nest,--James Tapster, as you
will have divined ere now, was fond of good workaday phrases,--yet she
had a pleasant, respectful manner, and kept rough order among the
younger servants.

Mr. Tapster's sister-in-law now interfered only where his children were
concerned. Never having been herself a mother, she had, of course, been
able to form a clear and unprejudiced judgment as to how children, and
especially as to how little boys, should be physically and mentally
trained. As yet, however, Maud had not been very successful with her two
nephews and infant niece, but this was doubtless owing to the fact that
there had been something gravely amiss with each of the five nurses who
had been successively engaged by her during the last year.

The elder of Mr. Tapster's sons was six, and the second four; the
youngest child, a little girl named, unfortunately, Flora, after her
mother, was three years old. There had been a fourth, Flossy's second
baby, also a girl, who had only lived one day. All this being so, was it
not strange that a young matron who had led, for some four years out of
the eight years her married life had lasted, so wholly womanly and
domestic an existence as had fallen to the lot of Flossy, should have
been led astray by the meretricious allurements of unlawful
love?--Maud's striking thought and phrase, this.

[Illustration: "THERE STOOD CLOSE TO HIM, SO CLOSE THAT HE COULD ALMOST
HAVE TOUCHED HER, FLOSSY, HIS WIFE"]

And yet, Flossy, in spite o