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.

The reader may now be prepared to learn that it was not Mr. Timothy Cockayne, late of Lambeth, who had planned the family’s journey to Paris.  Mrs. Cockayne had projected the expedition.  Everybody went to Paris now-a-days, and you looked so very stupid if you had to confess in a drawing-room that you had never been.  She was sure there was not another family on Clapham Common, of their station, who had not been.  Besides, it would exercise the girls’ French.  If Mr. Cockayne could only consent to tear himself away from board-meetings, and devote a little time to his own flesh and blood.  They would go alone, and not trouble him, only what would their neighbours say to see them start off alone, as though they’d nobody in the world to care a fig about them.  At any rate, they didn’t want people to know they were neglected.  Now Mr. Cockayne had never had the most distant idea of leaving the ladies of his family to go alone to Paris.  But it pleased his wife to put the case in this pleasant way, and he never interfered with her pleasures.  He wanted very much to see Paris again, for he had never been on the banks of the Seine since 1840, when he made a flying visit to examine some new patent soap-boiling apparatus.  He was ordered about by both mother and daughters, by boat and railway.  He was reproached fifty times for his manners in insisting on going the Dieppe route.  He was loaded with parcels and baskets and rugs, and was soundly rated all the way from the railway station to the Grand Hotel, on the Boulevard des Capucines, for having permitted the Custom House officers to turn over Mrs. Cockayne’s boxes, as she said, “in the most impudent manner; but they saw she was without protection.”