Chapter IV

A year had gone by, and with the spring that whispered softly in the blossoming hedge-rows, and the melancholy cry of the female fowl calling to her downy brood, JOANNA had learnt new lessons of a beneficent life, and had crystallised them in aphorisms, shaken like dew from the morning leaf of her teeming fancy.

They sat at table together. BINNS, the butler, who himself dabbled in aphorism, and had sucked wisdom from the privy perusal of Sir JOHN's note-book, had laid before them a dish on which reposed a small but well-boiled leg of one that had trod the Southdowns but a week before in all the pride of lusty life. There was a silence for a moment.

"You will, as usual, take the fat?" queried Sir JOHN.

"Lean for me to-day," retorted JOANNA, with one of her bright flashes.

"Nay, nay," said her husband, "that were against tradition, which assigns to you the fat."

JOANNA pouted. Her mind rebelled against dictation. Besides, were not her aphorisms superior to those of her husband? The cold face of Sir JOHN grew eloquent in protest. She paused, and then with one wave of her stately arm swept mutton, platter, knife, fork, and caper sauce into the lap of Sir JOHN, whence the astonished BINNS, gasping in pain, with much labour rescued them. JOANNA had disappeared in a flame of mocking laughter, and was heard above calling on her maid for salts. But Sir JOHN ere yet the sauce had been fairly scraped from him, unclasped his note-book, and with trembling fingers wrote therein, "POOLE's master-pieces are ever at the mercy of an angry woman."