"I understand the parable. But a thief has to reckon with the law, and so has a married woman. You would not like to see me divorced, Harry?" "I would like to see you my wife," he retorted, evasively and stubbornly. "Impossible! I am already a wife. If I eloped with you, what respect could you have for me? "I should have whatever you liked, including you." "Which I don't like, and won't give," said Leah, indignantly. "In you I looked to find a friend, and I find nothing but ungoverned passion, that would drag the object of his adoration in the mud. Oh! oh!"--out came the inevitable handkerchief--"how I have been deceived!" By this time, the brute, with a penitent tail between its legs, was beginning to believe itself entirely in the wrong. Lady Jim, seeing this, became more than ever a tender woman. "I forgive you," she declared, plaintively, from behind a handkerchief mopping dry eyes; "this scene will be as though it had never been." "But my feelings," rebelled the cave-man, sulkily. "Will always be those of sacred friendship for a much-tried woman." "How can they be, when----?" "When you have made such a fool of yourself? Ah, my poor Harry, forget your folly. Remember only that I forgive you." "I don't exactly mean that," grumbled poor Harry, scenting sophistry, but unable to prevent the war being carried into his camp. "You--well----you see Oh, hang it, Leah, you know that I love you." "Not with that true love which is at once tender and respectful." These sentiments were really noble, but somehow the bewildered man was not in the mood for copy-book philosophy. "You offer me a stone and call it a beautiful loaf," said he, bitterly, and with heat. "Another parable! How biblical you are becoming!" said Lady Jim, desperately weary and with her eye on the clock. "I do not understand, nor do you, my poor boy." "I understand that you have made a fool of me," he snapped brusquely. "Oh no! Nature has been beforehand there," she retorted, beginning to lose her temper with a man who would explain. "Don't be silly, Harry! Go home, and think of our future." "_Our_ future!" He leaped to his feet with a shining face. Leah regretted the misused pronoun, and began to anticipate renewed melodrama. But her little tin god, pitying a votary whose nerves were jangled by stupid honesty, sent a seasonable visitor. "His Grace the Duke of Pentland," announced a grandiloquent footman, flinging wide the door. "Don't look so disgusted!" Leah flung an angry whisper in Askew's lowering face as she sailed forward to meet her father-in-law. "How are you, Duke? This is a surprise--a delightful one, of course. I never expected so pleasant a visitor." The room was tolerably dim, and the Duke had not the keen sight of his youth. "Mr.--Mr.----!" hesitated His Grace.