"You take a great deal of interest in your friend's cause, Dick!" For Dick had paused with parted lips, unable to say any more. "I do. It's a case that has been very interesting to me. He asks why he should take any notice of it at all--a thing done when he was scarcely of age, thousands of miles away, a mistake--an utter failure--a--ah!"--Dick had been speaking very rapidly against time to get out what he had to say before he was interrupted--"you don't see it in that point of view." "Do you mean to say, sir," said the old gentleman, "that you contemplate betraying a woman by a fictitious marriage, making her children illegitimate and herself a--I can't suppose that you have any real intention of that." Dick, who had got up in his excitement, here sat down suddenly as if his strength had failed him, with an exclamation of horror and alarm. "You don't see that? Why, what else would it be? so long as there is a Mrs.--what do you call her?--living--living and undivorced, the union of that woman's husband with another woman could be nothing but a fictitious marriage. There is a still uglier word by which it could be called." "You forget," said Dick, "that Mrs. Wyld--neither bears that name nor lays any claim to it. She put it aside long ago when she went upon her own course. It was nothing to her. She is not of the kind that try to keep up appearances or--anything of that sort. I'll do her that justice, she never meant to give the--the--unfortunate fellow any trouble. She didn't even want to stand in his way. She told him he should neither hear of her nor see her again. She is honest, though she is---- She has been to him as if she did not exist for years." "Why does that matter," cried the old gentleman, "so long as she does exist? There are women who are mad and never can be otherwise--but that does not give their husbands a right to marry again. Divorce her, since you are sure you can do so, and be thankful you have that remedy. I suppose this woman is--not a lady." "No." Dick spoke in a very low voice. He was quite cowed and subdued, looking at his old friend with furtive looks of trouble. Though he spoke carefully as if the case were not his own, yet he did not attempt to correct the elder man who at once assumed it to be so. He was so blanched and tremulous, nothing but the red of his lips showing out of his colourless face, and all the lines drawn with inward suffering, that he too might have been an old man. He added in the same low tones: "A man who is divorced would be a sort of monster to them. They would never permit--she would never listen." "You mean--the other? well, that is possible. There is a prejudice, and a just prejudice. So you think on the whole that to do a young lady--for I suppose the second is in your own class--a real, an unspeakable injury would be better than to shock her prejudices? If that is how you of the new generation confuse what's right and wrong----"