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 with himself. Duckett assumed a grand attitude of composure, repeated every half hour "we are going on admirably," and then tried to égayer Lord Chester by some horrible surgical anecdote, which, in the best of times would have made him shudder, and now that he was nervous and frightened, made him feel that he was actually undergoing the actual operation described. He was certain that nobody had ever had such a wife as his, and that no woman had ever endured so much with so much fortitude. He went from Lady Sarah to the Duchess to be soothed, and when their matronly experience failed to console him, he turned to Aileen, and as for the brusque word or two which Mrs. Hopkinson occasionally found time to bestow on him, he accepted it as an oracle from heaven.

At last, there came the joyful whisper, "a fine boy;" perhaps the only moment of a fine boy's existence in which his presence is more agreeable than his absence, so let him make the most of it. But if in the whole course of woman's sensitive life there is one moment of