Every day Mrs. Coddle discovered some fresh evidence to confirm her in the opinion she had formed as to the cause of the Major’s odd ways of late. Now she would catch him seated at his desk, and scribbling on his blotting-pad, in a fit of abstraction, the name of “Elcy.” Then he had taken to paying daily visits to Covent Garden Market in quest of bouquets and bunches of violets, or baskets of choice fruit, which he always sent up stairs with his compliments to the ladies. Then again he had grown all of a sudden “so dreadful purticlar” about his dress, that there was no bearing him. To-day the plaiting of his frill wouldn’t suit him—to-morrow his shoe wasn’t polished to his liking—and he had actually been and ordered a light poplin palletott, just because he had seed some of the “young bloods” about in them. And, to tell the truth, Mrs. Coddle was not very wrong in her surmises as to the reason of the Major’s altered behaviour towards her. Ever since he had first seen Elcy Sandboys weeping in the passage, and had discovered the tenderness of her care and regard for her father, he had had thoughts that he had never known before. Major Oldschool had left England as a mere boy of a cadet, and before he had been a year up at his station in India, he had discontinued corresponding with his mother’s lady’s-maid, to whom he had sworn eternal attachment on quitting the country. While out in India, the want of female society had, in a measure, inured him to celibacy, till at last he had gradually sunk into what the ladies termed “a hardened old bachelor.” On his return to England, however, Major Oldschool soon began to find that the Indian life, food, and climate, had made such inroads upon his constitution, and accustomed him to such habits of indolence, or rather dependence upon others for the execution of even his most trifling wants, that now that his retinue of black domestics was no longer at his command, he found it was utterly impossible to remain without some one to look after him, so he provided himself with that most miserable of all matrimonial make-shifts, an old crone of a housekeeper. Mrs. Coddle was not long in discovering how necessary she was to the comfort of the Major, nor in taking every advantage of him that his dependence upon her permitted. Major Oldschool, however, had not been altogether blind to the exactions of his housekeeper—but being naturally deficient in energy, and not exactly seeing any way of immediately extricating himself from the web that she had spun round him, he had tolerated her tyranny in as patient a manner as possible.