o the rectory?"

After an irrelevant interlude she stamped her foot.

"I don't care what you say, I won't marry an atheist. If you had the
least respect for his cloth, Olaf, you would call him up and
arrange--Oh, well! whatever you want to arrange--and permit me to powder
my nose without being bothered, because I don't want people to think you
are marrying a second helping to butter, and I never did like that
Baptist man on the block above, anyhow. And besides," said Patricia, as
with the occurrence of a new view-point, "think what a delicious scandal
it will create!"

II

Patricia spoke the truth. By supper-time Lichfield had so industriously
embroidered the Stapylton dinner and the ensuing marriage with
hypotheses and explanations and unparented rumors that none of the
participants in the affair but could advantageously have exchanged
reputations with Benedict Arnold or Lucretia Borgia, had Lichfield
believed a tithe of what Lichfield was repeating.

A duel was of course anticipated between Mr. Parkinson and Colonel
Musgrave, and the colonel indeed offered, through Major Wadleigh, any
satisfaction which Mr. Parkinson might desire.

The engineer, with garnishments of profanity, considered dueling to be a
painstakingly-described absurdity and wished "the old popinjay" joy of
his bargain.

Lichfield felt that only showed what came of treating poor-white trash
as your equals, and gloried in the salutary moral.

III

Meanwhile the two originators of so much Lichfieldian diversion were not
unhappy.

But indeed it were irreverent even to try to express the happiness of
their earlier married life ...

They were an ill-matched couple in so many ways that no long-headed
person could conceivably have anticipated--in the outcome--more than
decorous tolerance of each other. For apart from the disparity in age
and tastes and rearing, there was always the fact to be weighed that in
marrying the only child of a wealthy man Rudolph Musgrave was making
what Lichfield called "an eminently sensible match"--than which, as
Lichfield knew, there is no more infallible recipe for discord.

In this case the axiom seemed, after the manner of all general rules, to
bulwark itself with an exception. Colonel Musgrave continued to emanate
an air of contentment which fell perilously short of fatuity; and that
Patricia was honestly fond of him was evident to the most impecunious of
Lichfield's bachelors.

True, curtai