ondon?"

"No, Twickenham."

"You must excuse my curiosity, my dear Kennedy, and you must put it
down to my ignorance of the world. No doubt it is quite a simple thing
to persuade a young lady to go off with you for three weeks or so, and
then to hand her over to her own family at--what did you call the
place?"

"Twickenham."

"Quite so--at Twickenham. But it is something so entirely outside my
own experience that I cannot even imagine how you set about it. For
example, if you had loved this girl your love could hardly disappear in
three weeks, so I presume that you could not have loved her at all.
But if you did not love her why should you make this great scandal
which has damaged you and ruined her?"

Kennedy looked moodily into the red eye of the stove.

"That's a logical way of looking at it, certainly," said he. "Love is a
big word, and it represents a good many different shades of feeling. I
liked her, and--well, you say you've seen her--you know how charming
she could look. But still I am willing to admit, looking back, that I
could never have really loved her."

"Then, my dear Kennedy, why did you do it?"

"The adventure of the thing had a great deal to do with it."

"What! You are so fond of adventures!"

"Where would the variety of life be without them? It was for an
adventure that I first began to pay my attentions to her. I've chased
a good deal of game in my time, but there's no chase like that of a
pretty woman. There was the piquant difficulty of it also, for, as she
was the companion of Lady Emily Rood, it was almost impossible to see
her alone. On the top of all the other obstacles which attracted me, I
learned from her own lips very early in the proceedings that she was
engaged."

"Mein Gott! To whom?"

"She mentioned no names."

"I do not think that anyone knows that. So that made the adventure
more alluring, did it?"

"Well, it did certainly give a spice to it. Don't you think so?"

"I tell you that I am very ignorant about these things."

"My dear fellow, you can remember that the apple you stole from your
neighbour's tree was always sweeter than that which fell from your own.
And then I found that she cared for me."

"What--at once?"

"Oh, no, it took about three months of sapping and mining. But at last
I won her over. She understood that my judicial separation from my
wife made it impossible for me to do the right thing by her--but she
came all the same, and