ne, that Bunce was not so much of a fool
as he looked, and the other, that Mrs. Dillingham was a mother.

Once, however, judgment had been entered to the effect that Mrs.
Dillingham had never lawfully ceased to be Mrs. Hawkins, then the
real reason of our client's anxiety to be rid of his wife and her
child, a girl of six years, became apparent; for he instantly
announced his engagement to a fashionable widow, who lacked money
if not experience, and who needed the one as much as he had a super-
abundance of the other. He made a fairly liberal allowance for
his child and its mother, and since this was paid monthly through
our office, I had an opportunity of making their acquaintance; and
I confess that I had no sooner done so than I began to have a sort
of regret for my own part in the transaction. For Mrs. Dillingham
--Hawkins, or whatever she was--proved to be a rather sweet-faced
young woman, with great, sad blue eyes and a winsomely childish
innocence of expression that concealed, as I afterward found out,
a will of iron and a heart full of courage.

She used to come and wait for Gottlieb or me to pay over her money,
and while she waited she would sit there so helplessly, looking
withal so lovely, that the clerks cannot be blamed for having talked
to her. Incidentally she extracted from the susceptible Cohen
various trifles in the way of information which later proved highly
inconvenient. Yet she never asked me or my partner any questions
or showed the slightest resentment at the part we had played as
her husband's attorneys in ruining her life. Sometimes she brought
the little girl with her and I marvelled that Dillingham could have
sacrificed such a charming little daughter so easily.

Six months passed and the Dillingham scandal ceased to be a matter
of public or even of private interest. Other affairs, equally
profitable, engaged our attention, and the waiter, Hawkins, having
received a substantial honorarium from the firm's bank account,
had passed completely out of our minds. I had that winter been
giving a series of dinners at my house to actor clients and their
managers, and these had proved conspicuously successful for the
reason that my guests were of the sort who, after the wine had
begun to flow, had no hesitation in entertaining the rest of the
company by an exhibition of their talents. Occasionally, as part
of the fun, I would do a bit of a turn myself by way of reviving
old memories of the