Of the three sisters, the wife of the Major was, oddly enough, the one who was least inveterately solicitous of concealing the fact of her parentage.  Reticence, of course, she had to study with the rest; the Major was a walking book of reticence and the observances; he professed, also, in company with herself alone, to have had much trouble in drilling her to mark and properly preserve them.  She had no desire to speak of her birthplace.  But, for some reason or other, she did not share her hero’s rather petulant anxiety to keep the curtain nailed down on that part of her life which preceded her entry into the ranks of the Royal Marines.  Some might have thought that those fair large blue eyes of hers wandered now and then in pleasant unambitious walks behind the curtain, and toyed with little flowers of palest memory.  Utterly tasteless, totally wanting in discernment, not to say gratitude, the Major could not presume her to be; and yet his wits perceived that her answers and the conduct she shaped in accordance with his repeated protests and long-reaching apprehensions of what he called danger, betrayed acquiescent obedience more than the connubial sympathy due to him.  Danger on the field the Major knew not of; he did not scruple to name the word in relation to his wife.  For, as he told her, should he, some day, as in the chapter of accidents might occur, sally into the street a Knight Companion of the Bath and become known to men as Sir Maxwell Strike, it would be decidedly disagreeable for him to be blown upon by a wind from Lymport.  Moreover she was the mother of a son.  The Major pointed out to her the duty she owed her offspring.  Certainly the protecting aegis of his rank and title would be over the lad, but she might depend upon it any indiscretion of hers would damage him in his future career, the Major assured her.  Young Maxwell must be considered.

For all this, the mother and wife, when the black letter found them in the morning at breakfast, had burst into a fit of grief, and faltered that she wept for a father.  Mrs. Andrew, to whom the letter was addressed, had simply held the letter to her in a trembling hand.  The Major compared their behaviour, with marked encomiums of Mrs. Andrew.  Now this lady and her husband were in obverse relative positions.  The brewer had no will but his Harriet’s.  His esteem for her combined the constitutional feelings of an insignificantly-built little man for a majestic woman, and those of a worthy soul for the wife of his bosom.  Possessing, or possessed by her, the good brewer was perfectly happy.  She, it might be thought, under these circumstances, would not have minded much his hearing what he might hear.  It happened, however, that she was as jealous of the winds of Lymport as the Major himself; as vigilant in debarring them from access to the brewery as now the Countess could have been.  We are not dissecting human nature suffice it, therefore, from a mere glance at the surface, to say, that just as moneyed men are