"Fool!" said the lady, when she had possessed herself of the hen-pecked's secret, with a vixenish vinegar smile on her sallow lips, "you should have done it the first night!" The moral is obvious: the Persians say "Advice is useless to fools!" Pringle did not kill the cat at once; hence his position. The old campaigner sold out at Laburnum Cottage in another week or two, and came with the young imp Mortimer, her Persian cats, and green parrot, and all her multitudinous belongings, settling down like a swarm of locusts on the devoted parsonage. Gone thenceforth were all its tranquil joys. After a time the Lucca-oil-like-suavity which had formerly distinguished Lady Inskip in Pringle's mind, disappeared. She appeared now as the concentrated essence of verjuice or tartaric acid, and ruled the whole house with a rod of iron, becoming in truth the master of all. Poor Lizzie's life was made a burden to her; and she was treated as if she were a presumptuous intruder in her brother's house. The old campaigner wrung her little heart with continual allusions to the "Young Squire," and said how glad she "would have been to get him, miss!" making bitter comments on the way she said Lizzie had angled for Tom, and how he had gone off now and left her. "Served her right, too," she ought not to be "pining and whining and breaking her heart after a man who never cared for her!" When, you may be sure, our little friend answered and stuck up for her rights, whereupon the campaigner would go and complain to the supposed head of the family, and declare that she could not stop in the house with "that virago of a girl," and Pringle had to timidly urge that he would not keep Lady Inskip against her will for the world. Then the campaigner would commence with a stern philippic on ingratitude, and wind up by bursting into tears and wishing she had never been born to observe that particular day. Here Laura would interfere, Herbert Pringle beg the pardon of his mamma-in-law, and all would be soothed over for a time, and the campaigner would establish a fresh gap in the trenches she was engineering for universal sovereignty.