ter
herself, she was aware that there was no better method of reducing the
showy nettlesome paces of youth to the sober jog-trot of middle-age than
the restraining influence of the right kind of yokefellow. The qualities
Phil most needed in a wife were those possessed by a sober-minded,
unimaginative, placid girl of conventional mould. Such maidens are not
unknown in rural England, and Miss Heredith had not much difficulty in
picking upon one in the county sufficiently well-born to mate with the
Herediths. Miss Heredith perfected her plan in detail, and had even gone
to the length of drafting the letter which was to bring Phil down from
London to be matrimonially snared, when the news came that he had snared
himself in London without his aunt's assistance.

She did not like his wife from the first, and it was equally certain
that Phil's wife did not like her. It was a marvellous thing to Miss
Heredith that a shallow worldly girl like Violet should have captured
the heart of a young man like her nephew so completely as to cause him
to alter his ways of life for her. Phil loved Nature, and books, and
solitary ways; his wife detested such things. Phil, in his eagerness to
please her, and banish her apparent boredom with country life, had
suggested asking some people from London with whom, at one time, he
would have had very little in common. Perhaps his London life had
changed him, but if so, it was a change for the worse for a young man,
and a Heredith, to be so much under the thumb of his wife as to give up
his own habits of life at her behest. But Phil was so much in love that
he had done so, cheerfully and willingly. Violet's lightest wish was his
law.

These thoughts, and others like them, passed and repassed through Miss
Heredith's mind as she sat, day after day, in her nephew's sick room. It
was her custom to take her needlework there of an afternoon, and relieve
the nurse for two or three hours. But her sewing frequently lay idle in
her lap, and she leaned back in her chair, absorbed in thought, glancing
from time to time at Phil's worn face on the pillow, where he lay like
one exhausted and weary, reluctant to return to the turmoil of life. He
took his food and medicine with the docility of a child, and
occasionally smiled at his aunt when she ministered to him. Gradually he
mended and increased in bodily strength until he was able to sit up, and
smoke an occasional cigarette. Sometimes he talked a little with hi