"Oh, Philip, of course! Mother does spoil Philip dreadfully, poor fellow! She was a great friend of his mother's, you know, and his father is--but of course you know about his father. Phil simply worships mother, and I think she likes it. Any woman does," said Jemima, with the air of elderly wisdom which always amused Professor Thorpe. "Still, it's too bad of her to go off with him to-night, when I'd promised you a whole evening with her alone." He winced. He was beginning to realize that evenings alone profited him no more than evenings in company. "Since you've broken your promise," he said severely, "I think you will have to make me some reparation. This new dancing, now"--he mastered a certain trepidation--"it looks easy, if unbeautiful. Do you think you could teach it to me?" She rose with alacrity. "Of course I could! I always learn things much quicker than Jacky. You see it's taking three of them to teach her--two to dance for her and one to dance with her--and I know the steps already. Professor Jim," she said irrelevantly, with a faint sigh, "do you think it pays to be clever?" If Mrs. Kildare had noticed, she would have been more than a little astonished by the vision of shy and awkward James Thorpe, one of the leading psychologists of the country, capering nimbly in a lady's chamber under the guidance of her eldest child. But she did not notice. * * * * * "Do you know what this means?" she said, after a long silence. "It means that we have won, my dear. The very judge who tried him!" Philip nodded, without speaking. Her hand groped for his and clung to it. As the sisters of Lazarus must have felt when he who was dead came to them out of the tomb in his cere-cloths, so these two felt now. After seventeen years, the thing they had vainly hoped and striven for was about to be granted--not justice (it was too late for that), but mercy, freedom. And after seventeen years, what was a man to do with freedom? "I am--frightened, a little," Philip said at last, turning to her. "What am I to do with father?" "You are to bring him straight to me. No, I will go with you and bring him home myself." "_Home?_ To Basil Kildare's house?" She lifted her head, "What matter whose house? We shall be married at once." He said in a low voice, "Have you forgotten--the will?"