"Ernie won't let her down," answered Mrs. Trupp with bright confidence. "He's an absolute gentleman. All the Beauregards are." "Alf, for instance," commented the curmudgeon across the hearth. "So that's _that_," continued the lady with the emphasis of one who scents opposition. "She wants help; and he wants her. And he's been true to her for a year and a half now. That's a long time in that class," she went on with fine inconsistency. "So _that's_ settled." "Pity," grumbled the recalcitrant. "He's doing nicely now, Pigott tells me--and will so long as he doesn't get what he wants. If she marries him she'll make him happy and comfortable. She's just the sort of woman who would. And he'll go to pieces at once. There's nothing to muck a man's career like a happy marriage." Mrs. Trupp looked severely at the wicked man over her spectacles. "It's lucky _your_ marriage has proved such a failure, William Trupp," she said. The other drank his coffee and licked his lips. "What's done can't be undone, my dear," he grinned. "Bess, ask your mother to give me another cup of cawfee." Mrs. Trupp had no need to send for Ernie after all. For he called, and sitting in the dusk of the great French-windowed drawing-room in the very chair in which eighteen months before he had told of his loss, he told now of his treasure trove. There was no reserve or concealment between the two. What one did not know of the story the other could add. They were friends, intimates, made one by their common feeling for a woman who had suffered and endured. "One thing I knaw," said Ernie deeply. "She didn't commit adultery, whoever did." Mrs. Trupp, as often, wondered at and was made ashamed by the direct and spiritual insight of a rough-handed working man. "She loved him," said Ernie. "That's just all about it. Didn't know what he was, no more than a lamb knows what a tiger is till he's got her." "She's a good woman," responded Mrs. Trupp soberly; and added on a note, half-mischievous, half-cautious, not a little provocative--"I wonder if she'll have you." Whatever fears for the outcome of his enterprise Mrs. Trupp might entertain, Ernie himself had none. Indeed for so diffident a man he was astonishingly confident in a quiet way; and besieged his lady with a conquering sense of victory that would brook no doubt and little delay. Every Sunday morning found him crossing the white bridge at Aldwoldston; and many a week-day evening saw him in Frogs' Hall.