t it may be put that she did not object to
smoking. The late Canon smoked incessantly. Perhaps the odour of
tobacco was the only keen memory of her honeymoon and brief married
life.

During his seven years of soft living, Phineas McPhail scientifically
developed an original taste for whisky. He seethed himself in it as
the ancients seethed a kid in its mother's milk. He had the art to do
himself to perfection. Mrs. Trevor beheld in him the mellowest and
blandest of men. Never had she the slightest suspicion of evil
courses. To such a pitch of cunning in the observance of the
proprieties had he arrived, that the very servants knew not of his
doings. It was only later--after Mrs. Trevor's death--when a surveyor
was called in by Marmaduke to put the old house in order, that a
disused well at the back of the house was found to be half filled with
hundreds of whisky bottles secretly thrown in by Phineas McPhail.

The Dean and Mr. Manningtree, although ignorant of McPhail's habits,
agreed in calling him a lazy hound and a parasite on their fond
sister-in-law. And they were right. But Mrs. Trevor turned a deaf ear
to their slanders. They were unworthy to be called Christian men, let
alone ministers of the Gospel. Were it not for the sacred associations
of her father and her husband, she would never enter the cathedral
again. Mr. McPhail was exactly the kind of tutor that Marmaduke
needed. Mr. McPhail did not encourage him to play rough games, or take
long walks, or row on the river, because he appreciated his
constitutional delicacy. He was the only man in the world during her
unhappy widowhood who understood Marmaduke. He was a treasure beyond
price.

When Doggie was sixteen, fate, fortune, chance, or whatever you like
to call it, did him a good turn. It made his mother ill, and sent him
away with her to foreign health resorts. Doggie and McPhail travelled
luxuriously, lived in luxurious hotels and visited in luxurious ease
various picture galleries and monuments of historic or aesthetic
interest. The boy, artistically inclined and guided by the idle yet
well-informed Phineas, profited greatly. Phineas sought profit to them
both in other ways.

"Mrs. Trevor," said he, "don't you think it a sinful shame for
Marmaduke to waste his time over Latin and mathematics, and such
things as he can learn at home, instead of taking advantage of his
residence in a foreign country to perfect himself in the idiomatic and
conversational