As regarded spiritual likeness, mutual affection, and assimilation of feeling and opinion, he and his wife had receded, the one from the other, in the fourteen years of their wedded life.  There had been no decided rupture.  Both disliked altercations, and where radical opposition of sentiment existed, they avoided the unsafe ground by tacit consent.  Mabel’s uniform policy was that of outward submission to the mandates of her chief.

“After all, it makes little difference!” she fell into the habit of saying in the earlier years of matronhood, and he interpreted her listless acquiescence in his decrees as faith in the soundness of his judgment, the infallibility of his decisions.  No woman of sense and spirit ever becomes an exemplar in unquestioning obedience to a mortal man, unless through apathy—­fatal torpor of mind or heart.  Of this fact in moral history our respactable barrister was happily ignorant.  He was no better versed in the lore of the heart feminine than when he accepted Mabel Aylett’s esteem and friendly regard in lieu of the shy, but ardent attachment a betrothed maiden should have for the one she means to make her husband.

He respected her thoroughly, and loved her better than he did anybody else.  She was the one woman he recognized as his sister’s superior—­supremacy due to the influence of single-minded integrity and modest dignity.  What Mabel said, he believed without gainsaying; while Clara’s clever dicta required winnowing to separate the probably spurious from the possibly true.  If his tone, in addressing his wife, was seldom affectionate, it was never careless, as that which replied to his sister’s raillery.

“Generally,” he said in his metallic, unmodulated voice.  “The man who would cast away health, usefulness, and fortune in his chagrin at not winning the hand of a shallow-pated, volatile flirt, must be both silly and susceptible.”

“Rosa Tazewell may have been shallow of heart, but she was not of pate,” answered Mr. Aylett, with a cold sneer.  “She was a fair plotter, and not fickle of purpose when she had her desires upon a much-coveted object.  Her marriage proved that.  She meant to captivate Chilton before she had known him a month—­yes, and to marry him, as she finally did.  Her intermediate conquests were but the practice that was to perfect her in her profession.  Does anybody know, by the way, if he has ever taken a second wife to his bereaved bosom?”

A brief silence, then Mrs. Aylett said, negligently, “I think not.  Mrs. Trent, Rosa’s sister, was expatiating to me a month since upon the beauty and accomplishments of his daughter, and she said nothing of a step-mother.  Father and child live with a married sister of Mrs. Chilton, I believe.”

“I had not heard that Rosa left a child,” remarked Mabel, interested.  “I understood that two died before the mother.”

“Only one—­and that the younger.  Miss Florence is now twelve years old, Mrs. Trent says.  I saw her at church once, when she was visiting her grandmother and aunts.  She is really passable—­but very unlike her mother.”