ome, I am hungry."

He spoke with that affectation of jollity with which husbands of his
calibre veil their bad temper.

Sylvia had her defensive armour on in a twinkling. "Of course, you two
men will be against me. When did two men ever disagree upon the subject
of wifely duties? However, I shall read in spite of you. Do you know,
Mr. North, that when I married I made a special agreement with Captain
Frere that I was not to be asked to sew on buttons for him?"

"Indeed!" said North, not understanding this change of humour.

"And she never has from that hour," said Frere, recovering his suavity
at the sight of food. "I never have a shirt fit to put on. Upon my word,
there are a dozen in the drawer now."

North perused his plate uncomfortably. A saying of omniscient Balzac
occurred to him. "Le grand ecueil est le ridicule," and his mind began
to sound all sorts of philosophical depths, not of the most clerical
character.

After dinner Maurice launched out into his usual topic--convict
discipline. It was pleasant for him to get a listener; for his wife,
cold and unsympathetic, tacitly declined to enter into his schemes for
the subduing of the refractory villains. "You insisted on coming here,"
she would say. "I did not wish to come. I don't like to talk of these
things. Let us talk of something else." When she adopted this method
of procedure, he had no alternative but to submit, for he was afraid of
her, after a fashion. In this ill-assorted match he was only apparently
the master. He was a physical tyrant. For him, a creature had but to be
weak to be an object of contempt; and his gross nature triumphed over
the finer one of his wife. Love had long since died out of their life.
The young, impulsive, delicate girl, who had given herself to him seven
years before, had been changed into a weary, suffering woman. The wife
is what her husband makes her, and his rude animalism had made her
the nervous invalid she was. Instead of love, he had awakened in her a
distaste which at times amounted to disgust. We have neither the skill
nor the boldness of that profound philosopher whose autopsy of the human
heart awoke North's contemplation, and we will not presume to set forth
in bare English the story of this marriage of the Minotaur. Let it
suffice to say that Sylvia liked her husband least when he loved her
most. In this repulsion lay her power over him. When the animal and
spiritual natures cross each other, the nobler tr