"Why, my dear man," Julia cried, "you take the wind straight out of my sails! What I'm here to ask of _you_ is that you'll confess to having been even a worse fiend than you were shown up for; to having made it impossible mother should _not_ take proceedings." There!--she had brought it out, and with the sense of their situation turning to high excitement for her in the teeth of his droll stare, his strange grin, his characteristic "Lordy, lordy! What good will that do you?" She was prepared with her clear statement of reasons for her appeal, and feared so he might have better ones for his own that all her story came in a flash. "Well, Mr. Pitman, I want to get married this time, by way of a change; but you see we've been such fools that, when something really good at last comes up, it's too dreadfully awkward. The fools we were capable of being--well, you know better than any one: unless perhaps not quite so well as Mr. Connery. It has got to be denied," said Julia ardently--"it has got to be denied flat. But I can't get hold of Mr. Connery--Mr. Connery has gone to China. Besides, if he were here," she had ruefully to confess, "he'd be no good--on the contrary. He wouldn't deny anything--he'd only tell more. So thank heaven he's away--there's _that_ amount of good! I'm not engaged yet," she went on--but he had already taken her up. "You're not engaged to Mr. French?" It was all, clearly, a wondrous show for him, but his immediate surprise, oddly, might have been greatest for that. "No, not to any one--for the seventh time!" She spoke as with her head held well up both over the shame and the pride. "Yes, the next time I'm engaged I want something to happen. But he's afraid; he's afraid of what may be told him. He's dying to find out, and yet he'd die if he did! He wants to be talked to, but he has got to be talked to right. You could talk to him right, Mr. Pitman--if you only _would_! He can't get over mother--that I feel: he loathes and scorns divorces, and we've had first and last too many. So if he could hear from you that you just made her life a hell--why," Julia concluded, "it would be too lovely. If she _had_ to go in for another--after having already, when I was little, divorced father--it would 'sort of' make, don't you see? one less. You'd do the high-toned thing by her: you'd say what a wretch you then were, and that she had had to save her life. In that way he mayn't mind it. Don't you see, you sweet man?" poor Julia pleaded. "Oh," she wound up as if his fancy lagged or his scruple looked out, "of course I want you to _lie_ for me!" It did indeed sufficiently stagger him. "It's a lovely idea for the moment when I was just saying to myself--as soon as I saw you--that you'd speak the truth for _me_!" "Ah, what's the matter with 'you'?" Julia sighed with an impatience not sensibly less sharp for her having so quickly scented some lion in her path.