The archer promptly fluttered in, all smiles, believing there was only plain sailing ahead. “Do you love my husband, Mrs. Parker?” Cartice asked. “Why, what do you mean?” snapped the enraged siren. “I must suppose you love him, because I saw you and him kissing each other. I could not kiss a man I did not love, and I suppose it must be the same with you and all other self-respecting women. I have been telling him that if you and he love each other, I will not stand in your way. I want to tell you the same.” Mrs. Parker was unaccustomed to this kind of a situation. She was only skilled in slyness, not in open combat. Embarrassed, she turned to Doring, who stood convicted and shrinking, unable to defend himself or her. “Mr. Doring,” she said--her voice was dry and nervous--“you should have explained to your wife that we saw her coming and made a foolish attempt to tease her.” “He explains it differently,” said Cartice, quietly. “He says you seemed to expect some demonstration of affection from him, and he ‘made up to you,’ as he calls it, because not to do so would be to disappoint and mortify you.” Then Parker turned to Doring swelling with rage and chagrin, fire and flame darting from her eyes, and then, without a word flounced out of the room, and early the next day left the hotel. Doring, a victim of the cowardice for which his sex is noted when entrapped, began to breathe freer. He sent a snort of derision after the retreating charmer. “There, the sentimental old lady will not trouble us again, I fancy,” he said, with the air of one who sees the end of a disagreeable affair. “That may be,” said his wife, sadly, “but it cannot put us back in our old places.” “What do you mean?” “Is it necessary to explain what is so clear? This affair has changed my attitude toward you entirely. It has killed my confidence in your honesty, and revealed your character to me in a new light. I can never be the same to you as before.” Thoroughly frightened he began to cast about for bigger straws to catch at. His wife took on new value in his eyes. An hour or so before he had commiserated himself for being tied to her, and had wondered why a being so superior as he had ever been attracted to one so ordinary as she. Now he wanted to keep her at all costs. He was one to whom blessings brightened astonishingly as they took their flight. “You don’t mean to say you would leave me for a trifle like that, Cartice? It would be ridiculous. Everybody would laugh at you. Why, that little episode is nothing. You should know some of the really reprehensible things married men do and think nothing of it. Men don’t bother much about loyalty and the finer moralities, I assure you. They’re good enough for women, but men can’t walk that kind of a line, you know. Your ideas are too depressingly antique for the age you live in.”