Aprils Lady | Page 2

glares back at him with infinite promise of a future settlement of all their disputes in her ethereal eyes. "'Twas my salt-cellar, not hers!"
"Ladies first--pleasure afterwards," says his father somewhat idly.
"Oh Freddy!" says his wife.
"Seditious language I call it," says Jocelyne with a laugh.
"Eh?" says Mr. Monkton. "Why what on earth have I been saying now. I quite believed I was doing the heavy father to perfection and teaching Tommy his duty."
"Nice duty," says Jocelyne, with a pretence of indignation, that makes her charming face a perfect picture. "Teaching him to regard us as second best! I like that."
"Good heavens! did I give that impression? I must have swooned," says Mr. Monkton penitently. "When last in my senses I thought I had been telling Tommy that he deserved a good whipping; and that if good old Time could so manage as to make me my own father, he would assuredly have got it."
"Oh! your father!" says Mrs. Monkton in a low tone; there is enough expression in it, however, to convey the idea to everyone present that in her opinion her husband's father would be guilty of any atrocity at a moment's notice.
"Well, 'twas my salt-cellar," says Tommy again stoutly, and as if totally undismayed by the vision of the grand-fatherly scourge held out to him. After all we none of us feel things much, unless they come personally home to us.
"Was it?" says Mr. Monkton mildly. "Do you know, I really quite fancied it was mine."
"What?" says Tommy, cocking his ear. He, like his sister, is in a certain sense a fraud. For Tommy has the face of a seraph with the heart of a hardy Norseman. There is nothing indeed that Tommy would not dare.
"Mine, you know," says his father, even more mildly still.
"No, it wasn't," says Tommy with decision, "it was at my side of the table. Yours is over there."
"Thomas!" says his father, with a rueful shake of the head that signifies his resignation of the argument; "it is indeed a pity that I am not like my father!"
"Like him! Oh no," says Mrs. Monkton emphatically, impulsively; the latent dislike to the family who had refused to recognize her on her marriage with their son taking fire at this speech.
Her voice sounds almost hard--the gentle voice, that in truth was only meant by Mother Nature to give expression to all things kind and loving.
She has leant a little forward and a swift flush is dyeing her cheek. She is of all women the youngest looking, for her years; as a matron indeed she seems absurd. The delicate bloom of girlhood seems never to have left her, but--as though in love of her beauty--has clung to her day by day. So that now, when she has known eight years of married life (and some of them deeply tinctured with care--the cruel care that want of money brings), she still looks as though the morning of womanhood was as yet but dawning for her.
And this is because love the beautifier went with her all the way! Hand in hand he has traveled with her on the stony paths that those who marry must undoubtedly pursue. Never once had he let go his hold, and so it is, that her lovely face has defied Time (though after all that obnoxious Ancient has not had yet much opportunity given him to spoil it), and at twenty-five she looks but a little older than her sister, who is just eighteen, and seven years younger than she is.
Her pretty soft grey Irish eyes, that are as nearly not black as it is possible for them to be, are still filled with the dews of youth. Her mouth is red and happy. Her hair--so distinctly chestnut as to be almost guilty of a shade of red in it here and there--covers her dainty head in rippling masses, that fall lightly forward, and rest upon a brow, snow-white, and low and broad as any Greek's might be.
She had spoken a little hurriedly, with some touch of anger. But quick as the anger was born, so quickly does it die.
"I shouldn't have said that, perhaps," says she, sending a little tremulous glance at her husband from behind the urn. "But I couldn't help it. I can't bear to hear you say you would like to be like him."
She smiles (a little, gentle, "don't-be-angry-with-me" smile, scarcely to be resisted by any man, and certainly not by her husband, who adores her). It is scarcely necessary to record this last fact, as all who run may read it for themselves, but it saves time to put it in black and white.
"But why not, my dear?" says Mr. Monkton, magisterially. "Surely, considering all things, you have reason to be deeply grateful to Sir George. Why, then, abuse him?"
"Grateful!