id you hear me, Mr. Kennyfeck, or is it you want to pass off your
dulness for deafness? Did you hear me, I say?"

"Yes, I heard--but I really do not know--that is, I am unaware how--I
cannot see--"

"Oh, the old story," sighed she--"injured innocence! Well, sir, I was
asking you if you felt gratified with our present prospects? Linton's
intimacy was bad enough, but the Kilgoff friendship is absolute, utter
ruin. That crafty, old, undermining peer, as proud as poor, will soon
ensnare him; and my Lady, with her new airs of a viscountess, only
anxious to qualify for London by losing her character before she appears
there!"

"As to the agency--"

"The agency!" echoed she, indignantly, "do your thoughts never by any
chance, sir, take a higher flight than five per cent.?--are you always
dreaming of your little petty gains at rent-day? I told you, sir, how
the patron might be converted into a son-in-law--did I not?"

"You did, indeed, and I'm certain I never threw any impediment in the
way of it."

"You never threw any impediment in the way of your child's succeeding
to a fortune of sixteen thousand a year! You really are an exemplary
father."

"I 'd have forwarded it, if I only knew how."

"How good of you! I suppose you 'd have drawn up the settlements if
ordered. But so it is--all my efforts through life have been thwarted by
you! I have labored and toiled day and night to place my children in the
sphere that their birth, on one side at least, would entitle them to,
and you know it."

Now this Mr. Kennyfeck really did not know. In his dull fatuity he
always imagined that he was the honey-gatherer of the domestic hive, and
that Mrs. Kennyfeck had in her own person monopolized the functions of
queen bee and wasp together.

"Your low, pettifogging ambition never soared above a Softly or a Clare
Jones for your daughters, while I was planning alliances that would have
placed them among the best in the land--and how have I been rewarded?
Indifference, coolness, perhaps contempt!" Here a flood of tears, that
had remained dammed up since the last torrent, burst forth in convulsive
sobs. "Ungrateful man, who ought never to have forgotten the sacrifice
I made in marrying him--the rupture with every member of my family--the
severance of every tie that united me to my own."

She ceased, and here, be it remembered, Mrs. Kennyfeck seemed to address
herself to some invisible jury empanelled to try Mr. Kennyfeck on a
serious