Mrs. Allestree rose. “You have!” she said uncompromisingly, “but then we’re both way behind the times. In the first place you’ve only had one wife and I’ve only had one husband! Margaret White left for Omaha to-day; of course she’ll be divorced and married to my nephew in half an hour. I’ve some hope now of being fashionable, if I can get a motor accident in the family! And you’re broken hearted because your girl wants to sing in public; tut, Stephen, you’re a hopeless old fogy, go and marry Martha O’Neal!” BOOK II I IT was early in the following December before Mrs. Allestree again came face to face with the situation which was so intimately connected, though in such different ways, with the happiness of two members of her family, her son and her nephew. The long months that had intervened, however, had not dulled her remembrance of that vivid scene in Margaret’s bedroom, or lessened the degree of her secret sympathy--which was in exact opposition to her judgment. It was a long time indeed before she could recur to that scene without a poignant feeling of guilt; her conscience pinched her with self-righteousness; she had found the mote in her sister’s eye without seeing the beam in her own, she had judged without experience. However, after awhile, this sensitiveness was enveloped in a thicker moral coating, and she began again to view the affair with horror. The two little White children were constant spectacles in the parks with their two French nurses and their general air of bewildered desolation; it was perfectly well known that Estelle had raised a terrible outcry for her mother and refused to be comforted, in spite of the conscientious efforts of poor old Mrs. White who, whatever her faults, was sincere in her devotion to the two poor little waifs of wealth. Mr. White, meanwhile, had created fresh scandal by his open devotion to Lily Osborne, and would probably have been still more outrageous if that astute young woman had not judiciously absented herself from the city at the very moment when society had reached the limit of its endurance; but her disappearance from the surface scarcely arrested White’s downward career; he was plunging deeper and deeper, and there were many rumors of scandals connected with his administration which would lead to his dismissal from the Cabinet. Some secret information from the Navy Department had found its way into the hands of a foreign government, and the way of its passage through White’s careless hands to Lily Osborne’s and from hers to the representative of the foreign power was unfortunately made altogether too plain to be ignored except on the surface of things, to hush scandal.