Perhaps Mrs. Cockayne was right. Cockayne had slaved in business only thirty-five years out of the fifty-two he had passed in this vale of tears, and had only lodged her at last in a brougham and pair. He might have kept in harness another ten years, and set her up in a carriage and four. She was sure he didn't know what to do with himself, now he had retired. He was much better tempered when he went off to business by the nine o'clock omnibus every morning; and before he had given himself such ridiculous airs, and put himself on all kinds of committees he didn't understand anything about, and taken to make himself disagreeable to his neighbours in the vestry-hall, and moving what he called amendments and riders, for the mere pleasure, she verily believed, of opposing somebody, as he did everybody in his own house, and of hearing himself talk. Does the reader perceive by this time the kind of lady Mrs. Cockayne was, and what a comfort she must have been to her husband in the autumn of his life? How he must have listened for what the novelists call "her every footstep," and treasured her every syllable! It was mercifully ordained that Mr. Cockayne should be a good-tempered, non-resisting man. When Mrs. Cockayne was, as her sons pleasantly and respectfully phrased it, "down upon the governor," the good man, like the flowers in the poem, "dipped and rose, and turned to look at her." He sparkled while she stormed. He smiled when the shafts of her sarcasm were thrown point-blank at him. He was good-tempered before the storm began, while it lasted, and when it was over. Mrs. Cockayne had the ingenuity to pretend that Cockayne was the veriest tyrant behind people's backs; he who, as a neighbour of his very expressively put the case, dared not help himself to the fresh butter without having previously asked the permission of his wife. Fate, in order to try the good-nature of Timothy Cockayne to the utmost, had given him two daughters closely resembling, in patient endurance and self-abnegation, their irreproachable mamma. Sophonisba--at whom the reader has already had a glimpse, and whom we last saw demolishing her second _baba_ at Felix's, was the eldest daughter--and the second was Theodosia. There was a third, Carrie; she was the blue, and was gentle and contented with everything, like her father.