ed not to swallow the antique claim that of all
terrestrial _carnivora_ only man and the lion are truly
monogamous--but more the fact it had been made such a back-stairs
affair with no solitary redeeming touch of dignity.

Dinky-Dunk, I suppose, would have laughed it away, if I hadn't walked
in on them with their arms about each other, and the bandy-legged one
breathing her capitulating sighs into his ear. But there was
desperation in the eyes of Miss Alsina Teeswater, and it was plain to
see that if my husband had been merely playing with fire it had become
a much more serious matter with the lady in the case. There was, in
fact, something almost dignifying in that strickenly defiant face of
hers. I was almost sorry for her when she turned and walked
white-lipped out of the room. What I resented most, as I stood facing
my husband, was his paraded casualness, his refusal to take a tragic
situation tragically. His attitude seemed to imply that we were about
to have a difference over a small thing--over a small thing with brown
eyes. He could even stand inspecting me with a mildly amused glance,
and I might have forgiven his mildness, I suppose, if it had been
without amusement, and that amusement in some way at my expense. He
even managed to laugh as I stood there staring at him. It was neither
an honest nor a natural laugh. It merely gave me the feeling that he
was trying to entrench himself behind a raw mound of mirth, that any
shelter was welcome until the barrage was lifted.

"And what do you intend doing about it?" I asked, more quietly than I
had imagined possible.

"What would you suggest?" he parried, as he began to feel in his
pockets for his pipe.

And I still had a sense, as I saw the barricaded look come into his
face, of entrenchments being frantically thrown up. I continued to
stare at him as he found his pipe and proceeded to fill it. I even
wrung a ghostly satisfaction out of the discovery that his fingers
weren't so steady as he might have wished them to be.

"I suppose you're trying to make me feel like the Wicked Uncle edging
away from the abandoned Babes in the Woods?" he finally demanded, as
though exasperated by my silence. He was delving for matches by this
time, and seemed disappointed that none was to be found in his
pockets. I don't know why he should seem to recede from me, for he
didn't move an inch from where he stood with that defensively mocking
smile on his face. But abysmal gulfs of