“I know it, dear,” he said, apologetically, “and we'll talk it over to-morrow, and it may be possible to arrange it so that you shall go with me. But, speaking of Demorest, I think you don't quite do HIM justice. He really respects YOUR feelings and your knowledge of right and wrong more than you imagine. I actually believe he came here to-night merely to get me to interest you in an extraordinary love affair of his. I mean, Joan,” he added hastily, seeing the same look of dull repression come over her face, “I mean, Joan--that is, you know, from all I can judge--it is something really serious this time. He intends to reform. And this is because he has become violently smitten with a young woman whom he has only seen half a dozen times, at long intervals, whom he first met in a railway train, and whose name and residence he don't even know.” There was an ominous silence--so hushed that the ticking of the allegorical clock came like a grim monitor. “Then,” said Mrs. Blandford, in a hard, dry voice that her alarmed husband scarcely recognized, “he proposed to insult your wife by taking her into his shameful confidence.” “Good heavens! Joan, no--you don't understand. At the worst, this is some virtuous but silly school-girl, who, though she may be intending only an innocent flirtation with him, has made this man actually and deeply in love with her. Yes; it is a fact, Joan. I know Dick Demorest, and if ever there was a man honestly in love, it is he.” “Then you mean to say that this man--an utter stranger to me--a man whom I've never laid my eyes on--whom I wouldn't know if I met in the street--expects me to advise him--to--to--” She stopped. Blandford could scarcely believe his senses. There were tears in her eyes--this woman who never cried; her voice trembled--she who had always controlled her emotions. He took advantage of this odd but opportune melting. He placed his arm around her shoulders. She tried to escape it, but with a coy, shy movement, half hysterical, half girlish, unlike her usual stony, moral precision. “Yes, Joan,” he repeated, laughingly, “but whose fault is it? Not HIS, remember! And I firmly believe he thinks you can do him good.” “But he has never seen me,” she continued, with a nervous little laugh, “and probably considers me some old Gorgon--like--like--Sister Jemima Skerret.” Blandford smiled with the complacency of far-reaching masculine intuition. Ah! that shrewd fellow, Demorest, was right. Joan, dear Joan, was only a woman after all. “Then he'll be the more agreeably astonished,” he returned, gayly, “and I think YOU will, too, Joan. For Dick isn't a bad-looking fellow; most women like him. It's true,” he continued, much amused at the novelty of the perfectly natural toss and grimace with which Mrs. Blandford received this statement. “I think he's been pointed out to me somewhere,” she said, thoughtfully; “he's a tall, dark, dissipated-looking man.”