For the first two or three months of his widowerhood (how else could he term his present peculiar wifeless condition?) there had been a constant coming and going of servants, first chosen, and then dismissed, by Maud. At last she suggested that her brother-in-law should engage a lady housekeeper, and the luckless James Tapster had even interviewed several applicants for the post after they had been chosen--sifted out, as it were--by Maud. Unfortunately, they had all been more or less of his own age, and plain, very plain; while he, naturally enough, would have preferred to see something young and pretty about him again. It was over this housekeeper question that he had at last escaped from Maud's domestic thraldom; for his sister-in-law, offended by his rejection of each of her candidates, had declared that she would take no more trouble about his household affairs! Nay, more, she had reminded him with a smile that she had honestly tried to make pleasant, that there is, after all, no fool like an old fool--about women. This insinuation had made Mr. Tapster very angry, and straightway he had engaged a respectable cook-housekeeper, and, although he had soon become aware that the woman was feathering her own nest,--James Tapster, as you will have divined ere now, was fond of good workaday phrases,--yet she had a pleasant, respectful manner, and kept rough order among the younger servants. Mr. Tapster's sister-in-law now interfered only where his children were concerned. Never having been herself a mother, she had, of course, been able to form a clear and unprejudiced judgment as to how children, and especially as to how little boys, should be physically and mentally trained. As yet, however, Maud had not been very successful with her two nephews and infant niece, but this was doubtless owing to the fact that there had been something gravely amiss with each of the five nurses who had been successively engaged by her during the last year. The elder of Mr. Tapster's sons was six, and the second four; the youngest child, a little girl named, unfortunately, Flora, after her mother, was three years old. There had been a fourth, Flossy's second baby, also a girl, who had only lived one day. All this being so, was it not strange that a young matron who had led, for some four years out of the eight years her married life had lasted, so wholly womanly and domestic an existence as had fallen to the lot of Flossy, should have been led astray by the meretricious allurements of unlawful love?--Maud's striking thought and phrase, this. [Illustration: "THERE STOOD CLOSE TO HIM, SO CLOSE THAT HE COULD ALMOST HAVE TOUCHED HER, FLOSSY, HIS WIFE"]