“Our object is to get the child restored to your care and to compass a cessation of this insistence that you shall go abroad,--not to win in an argument. Now do you think this phrasing could offend Mr. Floyd-Rosney, or wound his feelings?” Paula, standing tall, pale, listless, beside the desk, leaning on one hand among the litter of discarded papers of the voluminous epistle, looked down into his anxious, upturned face, beneath his tousled, grizzled hair, pitying the limitations of his perceptions. “Any phrasing will offend Mr. Floyd-Rosney if he wishes to be offended,” she replied languidly, “and he has no feelings to wound.” She went slowly out of the room, leaving him meditatively biting the handle of his pen. The letter bade fair to become a permanent occupation. He worked at it late at night and all the forenoon of the next day, and when, at the two o’clock dinner, his wife suggested that he should take Paula out for a drive about the country,--she would be interested in seeing how little it had changed since she was a resident here--he shook his head doggedly over the big turkey that he was deftly carving. “No,--no,” he said, “I must get back to that--that document. You and one of the boys can take her to drive.” The “document” was duly finished at last and duly mailed. Then expectation held the household to fever heat. The return mail brought nothing; the next post was not more significant; nor the next; nor the next. A breathless suspense supervened. One Monday morning Major Majoribanks came into the sitting-room with a sheaf of newspapers in his trembling hand, a ghastly white face and eyes of living fire. He could not speak; he could scarcely control his muscles sufficiently to open a journal and point with a shaking finger to a column with great headlines. He placed the newspaper in the hands of his wife, who was alone in the room, then he went softly to the door, closed it, and sank down in an armchair, gasping for breath. His wife, too, turned pale as she read, but her hand was steady. Mr. Edward Floyd-Rosney, the paper recited, to the great amazement of the city, had brought suit against his wife for divorce. The allegations of the bill set forth that she had fled from her home with Randal Ducie, who was named as co-respondent, and the husband made oath that in seeking to intercept and reclaim her, following her to the station as soon as he discovered her absence, he had witnessed her departure in company with Randal Ducie just as the train moved out of the shed. Major Majoribanks presently hirpled, for he could scarcely walk, across the room, and laid his finger on another column in a different portion of the paper, and treating of milder sensations. “I didn’t need this to prove that--that--a base lie----” his stiff lips enunciated with difficulty.