lasses of milk, champagne bottles,
were always standing around her sofa.

"It is making rather a piggery of the place," Everard said more than
once to his wife.

It was a matter of importance to him, because he found he was expected,
both by his wife and Mrs Butt, to spend all his time there. Lucilla,
with her nursery, her conservatories, her interest in parochial
matters, had never been exacting; he had come and gone without
explanation, as it pleased him. But a half-hour unaccounted for came,
with Vera, to mean a sulk, to mean tears, to mean, eventually, a
nagging such as in all his life Lucilla had never given him. Certainly,
if he had prized Vera Butt's society in the days when he could get very
little of it, he had his fill now.

A meal being over, Lucilla would say--"I have such and such a thing to
do; you go in, dear, and keep Vera amused for an hour." And the hour
would stretch to two hours--till the next meal, even. And during that
time Vera gave him no rest. She would call upon him incessantly to tell
her things, to amuse her.

"Surely something interesting must have happened! Does nothing _ever_
happen in this house?" she would pout. "You used to say funny
things--do you remember how we laughed when Luce was ill? Say something
funny now, to keep me going?"

He, with inward resentment, would decline to be funny at command, and
she would pass on to the reproachful stage, and so, by easy passage, to
the stages of tears and sulks and semi-insensibility; when he would
have to dab her forehead with eau-de-Cologne, and rub her hands, or to
lift her head higher with his arm beneath the pillow.

"I'm a married man, but I never was called on to do this kind of thing
before," he would say to himself.

And at last--"I'm hanged if I'm not getting fairly sick of it," he
said.

Then came a day when, before going to his place by the invalid's sofa,
he ran up to the nursery and fetched Billy down.

"All nonsense," he said to himself as he carried the child, perched on
his shoulder and delightedly holding on by his hair, downstairs. "She
screams and cries enough herself; suppose Billy takes his turn!"

"Look here!" he said as the pair entered, "here's Boy Billy come to see
you."

Boy Billy struggled down from the paternal shoulder, ran across the
room as fast as his fat legs would take him, and with a delighted cry
of "mummy! mummy!" hurled himself upon the lady on the sofa. To fly
back to his father, with outfl