, with severe sarcasm.

Lady Bellamy cut the top off an egg with a single clean stroke--all
her movements were decisive--before she answered.

"I thought," she said, "that we had done with that sort of nonsense
some years ago; are you going to begin it again?"

"Yes, Lady Bellamy, I am. I am not going to stand being bullied and
jeered at by that damned scoundrel Caresfoot any more. I am not going
to stand your eternal visits to him."

"You have stood them for twenty years; rather late in the day to
object now, isn't it?" she remarked, coolly, beginning her egg.

"It is never too late to mend; it is not too late for you to stop
quietly at home and do your duty by your husband."

"Most men would think that I had done my duty by him pretty well.
Twenty years ago you were nobody, and had, comparatively speaking,
nothing. Now you have a title and between three and four thousand a
year. Who have you to thank for that? Certainly not yourself."

"Curse the title and the money! I had rather be a poor devil of an
attorney with a large family, and five hundred a year to keep them on,
than live the life I do between you and that vulgar beast Caresfoot.
It's a dog's life, not a man's;" and poor Bellamy was so overcome at
his real or imaginary wrongs that the tears actually rolled down his
puffy little face.

His wife surveyed him with some amusement.

"I think," she said, "that you are a miserable creature."

"Perhaps I am, Anne; but I tell you what it is, even a miserable
creature can be driven too far. It may perhaps be worth your while to
be a little careful."

She cast one swift look at him, a look not without apprehension in it,
for there was a ring about his voice that she did not like, but his
appearance was so ludicrously wretched that it reassured her. She
finished her egg, and then, slowly driving the spoon through the
shell, she said,

"Don't threaten, John; it is a bad habit, and shows an un-Christian
state of mind; besides, it might force me to cr-r-rush you, in self-
defence, you know;" and John and the egg-shell having finally
collapsed together, Lady Bellamy ordered the brougham.

Having thus sufficiently scourged her husband, she departed in due
course to visit her own taskmaster, little guessing what awaited her
at his hands. After all, there is a deal of poetic justice in the
world. Little Smith, fresh from his mother's apron-strings, is
savagely beaten by the cock of the school, Jones, and to him