Like most thinking human beings, Theodore Carden had not lived to his present age without being struck by the illogical way the world wags. Accordingly, he was often surprised and made humorously indignant by the curious moral standards--they had so many more than one--of the conventional people among whom it was his fate to dwell and have his social being. Not one of the men he knew, with the exception of his father, and of those others--a small number truly--whom he believed to be sincerely, not conventionally, religious, but would have envied him the astonishing adventure which reconstituted itself so clearly before him to-day--and yet not one of them but would have been ready to condemn him for having done what he had done. Theodore Carden, however, so often tempted to kiss, never felt tempted to tell, and the story of that episode remained closely hidden, and would so remain, he told himself, to the end of his life. * * * * * What had happened had been briefly this. One day in the previous October, Carden had taken his seat in the afternoon express which stops at Birmingham on its way from the north to Euston, or rather, having taken a leisurely survey of the train, which was, as he quickly noted, agreeably empty, he had indicated to the porter carrying his bag a carriage in which sat, alone, a singularly pretty woman. As he afterwards had the delight of telling her, and, as he now reminded himself with a retrospective thrill of feeling, he had experienced, when his eyes first met those of the fair traveller, that incommunicable sensation, part physical, part mental, which your genuine Lothario, if an intelligent man, always welcomes with quickening pulse as a foretaste of the special zest to be attached to a coming pursuit. Carden's instinct as to such delicate matters had seldom played him false; never less so than on this occasion, for, within an hour, he and the lovely stranger had reached that delightful stage of intimacy in which a man and woman each feels that he and she, while still having much to learn about the other, are on the verge of a complete understanding. During the three hours' journey, Carden's travelling companion told him a great deal more about herself than he had chosen to reveal concerning his own life and affairs; he learnt, for instance, that she was the young wife of an old man, and that the old man was exceedingly jealous. Further, that she found the life she was compelled to lead "horribly boring," and that a widowed cousin, who lived near London, and from whom she had "expectations," formed a convenient excuse for occasional absences from home.