I have no doubt, indeed, that she probed the Doctor’s wound without knowing it. Meaning nothing but a certain matured frivolity and selfishness, not always inseparable from full-blown years, I think she confirmed him in his fear that he was a constraint upon his young wife, and that there was no congeniality of feeling between them, by so strongly commending his design of lightening the load of her life.

“My dear soul,” she said to him one day when I was present, “you know there is no doubt it would be a little pokey for Annie to be always shut up here.”

The Doctor nodded his benevolent head. “When she comes to her mother’s age,” said Mrs. Markleham, with a flourish of her fan, “then it’ll be another thing. You might put me into a jail, with genteel society and a rubber, and I should never care to come out. But I am not Annie, you know; and Annie is not her mother.”

“Surely, surely,” said the Doctor.