Yes, it was quite true; Maude seemed very happy, though her husband spent the best part of his time away from home, and was gloomy and ill at ease in her society. Harcourt Lowther’s hints had done their work, and the breach was very wide between husband and wife. Francis believed that his presence was odious to Maude. Maude imagined that home pleasures and simple domestic enjoyments were tame and insipid for Francis. And it had all been so easily done! Harcourt had only to make a few careless speeches about his friend. “You see, my dear Mrs. Tredethlyn, a man of our dear Frank’s temperament requires out-door amusements--hunting, and shooting, and racing, and all their agreeable concomitants in the way of meet breakfasts and uproarious dinners. A man with Frank’s animal spirits must have more boisterous pleasures than can be procured in a drawing-room, however charming--or amongst women, however delightful. There are some men who do _not_ care for the society of ladies; very excellent fellows in their way, but men in whose minds poetry and music, beautiful scenery, exquisite sentiments, grand ideas, are all classed under one head as ‘doosid bores.’ You know the style of man who calls everything except his horse and his dog a ‘doosid bore.’ I don’t say that Tredethlyn is _quite_ that sort of man, but he is not a domestic animal.” Mr. Lowther--sitting amongst a chaos of feminine litter, snipping out painted birds and flowers with a pair of fairy-like scissors for Maude’s _potichomanie_, looked the very incarnation of all that is domestic and devoted to the fair sex. Perhaps he fully estimated the advantage of the contrast between his own character and that of the men he had been describing. Mrs. Tredethlyn gave a little sigh. “And Frank _used_ to be so very domestic; and so dotingly fond of Floss,” she said, looking pensively at a mouse-coloured Skye terrier, whose cold nose reposed in the pink palm of her pretty hand. “However, we contrive to do very well without him, don’t we, Flossy Possy? and we shouldn’t care if he went to all the races in that dreadful calendar, and never, never came near his own house at all, should we, Flossy Possy?” Harcourt Lowther, looking up furtively from the covert of his auburn eyelashes, snipped a bird into mincemeat, and tightened his mouth until the thin lips were scarcely visible. “That nonsense sounds rather like pique,” he thought. “Can she care for the fellow? A handsome boor, who would scarcely know the difference between Beethoven’s ‘Moonlight’ and ‘Rule, Britannia!’--can she have the faintest sentiment of affection for such a man as that, when----” Mr. Lowther’s self-esteem finished the sentence,-- “When she knows me, and can contrast my infinite graces and accomplishments with the boor’s defects?”