Although Theodora had told Anne the truth about some things, she had not told her the whole truth. She saw very plainly that Sir John kept back more than he told about her predecessors. But this story has been a total failure if its readers do not yet know that Theodora possessed a superb and matchless courage that might well make Sir John tremble. Nor had Sir John been married to this dauntless creature five months without seeing that the was made of sterner stuff than poor Fatima and the rest. Each had felt, in golden days by Como's lake and in starlit Venetian nights, that sometime or other there would come a tussle for ascendency, and by a sort of tacit arrangement it was postponed until their arrival at Blood Hall. When Theodora had asked for her sister Anne's company, Sir John had taken it as a confession of weakness. Theodora, on the contrary, when she had carried her point, felt flushed with victory. Naturally she kept a sharp lookout for the closet which Mrs. Wodehouse had dwelt upon; and in forty-eight hours after her arrival she had pitched upon it. It opened into a pleasant room which Sir John called his study, and where he usually spent his mornings. The door was of black Spanish oak, beautifully carved in early English designs. Theodora had mapped out a campaign in which that closet figured, and about two weeks after her arrival she opened hostilities. * * * * * One stormy December night, Theodora, leaving Anne cowering over the drawing-room fire, sauntered off into Sir John's study, carrying her favorite poodle in her arms. "Come in," said he in response to her knock, and rising with ready courtesy. "You'll excuse my continuing my paper," he remarked, wheeling a comfortable chair to the sparkling wood fire for her. "Indeed I will not!" cried Theodora playfully, still holding on to the poodle, and taking the paper out of his hands almost before he knew it. Sir John frowned and then smiled. His American wife had certain ways that baffled him. She was always amiable, gay, and affectionate, but she took a tone toward him which startled while it amused him; and then her surprising glibness, her humor, her propensity to make small, though admirable jokes, her way of looking at life from the comic side, was astonishing, not to say appalling. Sir John wondered sometimes if American men were subject to much of this sort of thing. "No," kept on Theodora, with a pretty grimace, and pinching the poodle, "you positively shan't read the paper. I want you to talk to me and Hector." "What about?" asked Sir John, still half frowning. Theodora went up close to him and standing on tip-toe, with one arm yet around the poodle, leaned forward and putting two rosy fingers under her husband's chin said coquettishly: "About that closet over yonder, where people say you keep your murdered wives. Don't we, Hector?" "Yap! yap!" went the poodle.