than it had used to be when Sir Giles and Lady Piercey sat in their great chairs, and the game of backgammon was going on, and Meg about, and the child rampaging in all the corners. Even to have so many more people in the room gave it to him an air of additional animation. Patty told him it was the library that looked so dull. “Such a room for you all to sit in,” she said, “so gloomy and dark, with these horrid old pictures, and miles of books. Wait till I have the drawing-room in order.” But it didn’t amuse Gervase to watch all the alterations Mrs. Patty was making, nor how she was having the white and gold of the great drawing-room furbished up. The first night they sat in that huge room, with all the lamps lit, and the two figures lost among all the gilding and the damask, and reflected over and over again, till they were tired of seeing themselves in the big mirrors, Gervase felt more lonely than ever. Never had Patty found so hard a task before her,--not when she had to attend to all the customers alone, and keep their accounts separate in her head, and to chalk up as much as was safe to the score of one toper, and cleverly avoid hearing the call of another who had exceeded the utmost range of possible solvability. Never, when she had all that to do, had she found it so heavy upon her as it was to amuse Gervase. She invented noisy games for him, she plied him with caresses when other methods failed, she endeavoured to revive the old teasings and elusions of the courtship; but as Gervase’s imagination had never had much to do with his love-making, these attempts to return to an earlier stage were generally futile. He could not be played with--made miserable by a frown, brought back again by a smile, as had once been the case. And Patty had more than the labours of a Hercules in keeping her Softy in order. There was no one to defend him from now, no tyrannical mother to be defied, to make him feel the force of the wife’s protection. When Sir Giles was well enough to come to the drawing-room after dinner, the task was quite beyond the powers of any woman; for it was needful to please the old gentleman, to give up everything for him, to represent to him that his company was always a delight to his children. Poor old Sir Giles had winked and blinked in the many lights of the great drawing-room. He had been dazzled, but he had not been ill-pleased. “We never used this, you know, in your mother’s time but for company,” he said. It was Gervase whom he seemed to address, but it was Patty who replied. “I thought it would be a little change for you,” she said. “A change is always good, and there’s more light and more air. You should always have plenty of air, and not the associations that are in the other room.”