Her husband she would not willingly suffer to leave her for an instant. But for Mrs. Sutton's management and kindly authority, he would have been condemned to take his meals at her bedside and from the same tray with herself. She would be removed from the bed to the lounge by no other arms than his, and at any hour of the twenty-four he was liable to be called upon to read, sing, or talk her into composure. Variable as ever in mood and fancy, and more capricious in the exhibition of these, she was fond, sullen, teasing, and mirthful with him as the humor of the moment dictated; sometimes assailing him with reproaches for his indifference and want of regard for her wishes and tastes, now that she was no longer young, pretty, and sprightly; at others, clinging to him with protestations of repentance and love, bewailing her waywardness and imploring his forbearance; then, taking him to task for the slightest inadvertence--the spilling of a drop of her medicine or jarring of her sofa or bed; anon lauding him to the skies as the most skilful nurse she had, and enjoining upon all about her to render verbal testimonial to his irreproachableness as husband and man--oh! it was a wearisome, oftentimes a revolting duty to listen to and bear with it all--keep in mind though one did that the intolerable restlessness preluded centuries of dreamless repose. Mrs. Sutton could endure everything else better--and she believed that it was the same with Frederic--than the needless and puerile trickery to which Rosa resorted to achieve the most trivial purposes. If she wished that one of her sisters should pass the day with her, or to sit up for a part of the night, she worked upon her by means of others' intercessions, or broached the subject by covert passages, the end of which, she flattered herself, was successfully masked, until her train was ready for explosion. Did she set her fancy upon any particular article of diet, the same tortuous course was pursued to present the delicacy in question to the mind of him or her who, she designed, should be the provider. Under her sauciest rattle of fun or perversity lurked some subtle meaning. She had either some end to subserve, or wanted to possess herself of some bit of information she could have gained sooner and more easily by direct inquiry. Cajolery and intrigue had become a second nature, stronger than the original; and it never occurred to her that her wiles, in her mental and bodily decadence, were transparent as they had once been artful. A discovery, made on the fourth day of her visit, excited Mrs. Sutton's sympathies in behalf of the much enduring husband to a pitch it required long and serious pondering upon the wife's weakness and critical condition to restrain from indignant demonstration.