"Yes, and by way of preparation for that, you are falling in love with the girl from Boston. That will complicate matters charmingly. Really, Boyd, for a man of brains, education, culture and all that, you now and then make the most elaborately embroidered idiot of yourself I ever knew." "But I'm not in love with Miss Danvers; I never saw her until to-day." "I quite understand that. Nevertheless after you have met her three or four times more, you'll make the mistake of thinking yourself in love with her, and you'll court her and she will accept you--for she's positively daffy about you, as I easily found out after you left this evening. Then you'll awake to the fact that after all a man's affections are not so easily transferred as shares of stock are. You've never told me so, but I know, nevertheless, that the one love of your life is for Margaret Conway, and if you permit yourself to attempt a transfer of that passion, you'll repent it in sackcloth and ashes so long as you live. No, don't interrupt me. I'm in desperate earnest, and I'm going to say my say out, even if it results in your ordering my horse and bidding me be gone from Wanalah forever. Now listen to me. I once had a case of quarrelling heirs to deal with. If they had been left to their own devices, the whole estate they were fighting for would have been dissipated in chancery proceedings. I went to each of them separately and compelled each to tell me his side of the story. I found that the whole trouble lay in a lot of mutual misunderstandings, as most quarrels do. I multiplied seven by nine and found it made sixty-three, and after a little I got all of them to accept sixty-three as the product of the factors. In other words, I settled the whole affair, merely by finding out both sides of the facts. "Now in this case of yours, I am satisfied that the entire trouble arises from a mutual misunderstanding. I insist that you shall tell me all the facts as you understand them. I shall find means of discovering just what the facts are as the other side understands them. It is impertinent in an extreme degree for me to inquire into the matter at all. But in the practice of the law it is my function and duty to be impertinent. Go on, then, and tell me the facts as you understand them."