At last James Wingfield sat down. He began making notes of the instructions he had just received, though as he did so he knew well enough that he could not bring himself to draw up a will by which his own children might so greatly benefit. Then, as he sat, pen in hand, wondering with a certain discomfort as to what ought to be the practical effect of the conversation, there suddenly came a sound of hurrying feet up the shallow oak staircase, and through the door, flung open quickly and unceremoniously, strode once more Philip Dering. "I say, I've forgotten something!" he exclaimed, and then, as Wingfield instinctively looked round the bare spacious room--"No, I didn't leave anything behind me. I simply forgot to ask you one very important question----" He took off his hat, put it down with a certain deliberation, then drew up a chair, and placed himself astride on it, an action which to the other suddenly seemed to blot out the years which had gone by since they had been housemates together. "As I went down your jolly old staircase, Wingfield, it suddenly occurred to me that making a will may not be quite so simple a matter as I once thought it----" He hesitated a moment, then went on:--"So I've come back to ask you the meaning of the term 'proving a will.' What I really want to get at, old man, is whether my wife, if she became a widow, would have to give any actual legal proof of our marriage? Would she be compelled, I mean, to show her 'marriage lines'?" Wingfield hesitated. The question took him by surprise. "I fancy that would depend," he said, "on the actual wording of the will, but all that sort of thing is a mere formality, and of course any solicitor employed by her would see to it. By the way, I suppose you were married in Denmark?" He frowned, annoyed with himself for having forgotten a fact with which he must have been once well acquainted. "If you had asked me to be your best man," he added with a vexed laugh, "I shouldn't have forgotten the circumstances." Dering tipped the chair which he was bestriding a little nearer to the edge of the table which stood between himself and Wingfield; a curious look, a look half humorous, half deprecating, but in no sense ashamed, came over his sensitive, mobile face. "No," he said, at length, "we were not married in Denmark. Neither were we married in England. In fact, there was no ceremony at all." * * * * * The eyes of the two men, of the speaker and of his listener, met for a moment; but Wingfield, to the other's sudden uneasy surprise, made no comment on what he had just heard. Dering sprang up, and during the rest of their talk he walked, with short, quick strides, from the door to the window, from the window to the door.