Mr. Tapster's sister-in-law only now interfered where his children were concerned. Never having been herself a mother, she had, of course, been able to form a clear and unprejudiced judgment as to how children, and especially as to how little boys, should be physically and mentally trained.
As yet, however, Maud had not been very successful with her two nephews and infant niece, but this was doubtless owing to the fact that there had been something gravely amiss with each of the five nurses who had been successively engaged by her during the last year.
The elder of Mr. Tapster's sons was six and the second four; the youngest child, a little girl named unfortunately Flora after her mother, was three years old. There had been a fourth, Flossy's second baby, also a girl, who had only lived one day. All this being so, was it not strange that a young matron who had led, for some four years out of the eight years her married life had lasted, so wholly womanly and domestic an existence as had fallen to the lot of Flossy, should have been led astray by the meretricious allurements of unlawful love?--Maud's striking thought and phrase this.
And yet Flossy, in spite of her frivolity, had somehow managed the children far better than Maud was now able to do. At the present time, so Mr. Tapster admitted to himself with something very like an inward groan, his two sons possessed every vice of which masculine infancy is capable. They had become--so he was told by their indignant nurses--the terror of the well-behaved children who shared with them the pleasures of the Park Enclosure, where they took their daily exercise; and Baby, once so sweet and good, was now very fretful and peevish.
Again the train of Mr. Tapster's mournful thoughts was disturbed by a curious little sound--that of someone creeping softly down the staircase leading from the upper floors.
Once more he half rose from his chair, only to fall heavily back again with a look of impotent annoyance on his round, whiskered face. Where was the use of his going out into the hall and catching Nurse on her way to the kitchen? Maud had declared, very early in the day, that there should be as little communication as possible between the kitchen and the nursery; but Mr. Tapster sometimes found himself in secret sympathy with the two women whose disagreeable duty it was to be always with his three turbulent children.