On entering, and inquiring of the clerk in the anteroom, he was told that Mr. Merritt was in his private office, and alone. Declining the clerk’s offer to take in his card, Hanson went and turned the knob of the communicating door and entered the rear room. Mr. Merritt was sitting in his leather armchair, before his desk, not waiting, but leaning back and reading the morning paper. It was still early, and he had not settled to the day’s work. He looked up on hearing the unannounced entrance of the visitor, probably taking him to be one of the clerks, coming on official business, as they frequently did. On recognizing Hanson he started, flushed purple with indignation, and then, without laying aside his paper or rising from his chair, he demanded: “To what cause, sir, may I attribute the insult of this intrusion?” Hanson possessed much cool self-control, and more dignity than he had any moral right to show. He took a chair, and seated himself, without leave, and with quiet insolence, and replied: “I have come to inquire for my wife. Where is she?” “Your—wife, fellow? What wife? How should I know anything about your wife? I was not even aware that you had set up a wife. May I ask what misguided woman was idiot enough to marry you? Accept my congratulations,” said the lawyer dryly. “You know very well, sir, that I allude to your former ward. Miss Roma Fronde, who became my wife on the fifteenth of last November,” Hanson said with cool insolence. “Or, rather, whom you sought to marry, without her knowledge or consent, by the basest fraud that ever was practiced upon human being. That fraudulent marriage ceremony was set aside by the courts as illegal, therefore null and void,” Mr. Merritt explained. “That was a pity, for the lady’s sake, even more than for mine, when it is remembered that she went with me as my bride to the Isle of Storms,” Hanson said. “She went to her own house, sir. To the house of which she was the heiress and the mistress. You stole into that house without her knowledge or consent, like a sneak thief at midnight. You afterward broke into her room like a murderous burglar. She had you at her mercy. Your life was in her hands, at her disposal. You had forfeited your life to her by every human law. Yet she did not take it. She spared you for the Lord’s sake. Without hurting you she escaped. She saved herself.” “Who will believe that?” scornfully inquired Hanson. “Really, Mr. Merritt, if the court has decided that the rites by which Roma Fronde and myself were united were informal, illegal, I think their decision is very compromising to the lady, who lived with me as my wife for——” “Get out of my office, you low beast, before I pitch you out of the window!” exclaimed the lawyer, starting to his feet, and growing purple in the face. “Go!” Hanson went. He had no wish for a personal encounter with the stalwart old lawyer, even if it had not been possible to end in breaking his own neck out of a three-story window.