rest had come.  After breakfast he would open his letters in his study, but he liked her to be with him, and desired to discuss with her every application he got from a constituent.  He had his private secretary in a room apart, but he thought that everything should be filtered to his private secretary through his wife.  He was very anxious that she herself should superintend the accounts of their own private expenditure, and had taken some trouble to teach her an excellent mode of book-keeping.  He had recommended to her a certain course of reading,—­which was pleasant enough; ladies like to receive such recommendations; but Mr. Kennedy, having drawn out the course, seemed to expect that his wife should read the books he had named, and, worse still, that she should read them in the time he had allocated for the work.  This, I think, was tyranny.  Then the Sundays became very wearisome to Lady Laura.  Going to church twice, she had learnt, would be a part of her duty; and though in her father’s household attendance at church had never been very strict, she had made up her mind to this cheerfully.  But Mr. Kennedy expected also that he and she should always dine together on Sundays, that there should be no guests, and that there should be no evening company.  After all, the demand was not very severe, but yet she found that it operated injuriously upon her comfort.  The Sundays were very wearisome to her, and made her feel that her lord and master was—­her lord and master.  She made an effort or two to escape, but the efforts were all in vain.  He never spoke a cross word to her.  He never gave a stern command.  But yet he had his way.  “I won’t say that reading a novel on a Sunday is a sin,” he said; “but we must at any rate admit that it is a matter on which men disagree, that many of the best of men are against such occupation on Sunday, and that to abstain is to be on the safe side.”  So the novels were put away, and Sunday afternoon with the long evening became rather a stumbling-block to Lady Laura.

Those two hours, moreover, with her husband in the morning became very wearisome to her.  At first she had declared that it would be her greatest ambition to help her husband in his work, and she had read all the letters from the MacNabs and MacFies, asking to be made gaugers and landing-waiters, with an assumed interest.  But the work palled upon her very quickly.  Her quick intellect discovered soon that there was nothing in it which she really did.  It was all form and verbiage, and pretence at business.  Her husband went through it all with the utmost patience, reading every word, giving orders as to every detail, and conscientiously doing that which he conceived he had undertaken to do.  But Lady Laura wanted to meddle with high politics, to discuss reform bills, to assist in putting up Mr. This and putting down my Lord That.  Why should she waste her time in doing that which the lad in the next room, who was called a private secretary, could do as well?