e me, as I put in my mean little hack.

"I mean the Hartopp's husband," she explained.

"There is," I said. "'Boiler-plate' Hartopp. His given name is James,
and he prize-fights fair to middling." All this wasn't quite good
billiards, but we'd begun wrong that night, and we might as well keep
it up, thought I.

Natica Drayton was tapping her foot upon the fender. "H'm," she mused.
"Some of those horrid names sound interesting." Then she turned to me
abruptly. "I think, perhaps, you ought to go now," she suggested.

"I think so, too," I agreed, rising very hastily, and taking my leave.

"Have you Friday evening disengaged?" She flung this after me before I
had got to the hall.

"Yes," said I, all unthinking.

"Then we'll do it Friday," she said.

"We'll do what?" I asked, coming back to her. For once I felt
rebellious, and showed it, whereat she smiled.

"Supper after the theater at Cherry's."

"Oh, well, I don't mind that," I volunteered.

"With 'Boiler-plate' Hartopp," she added.

The searchlight dawned upon me. It swung around the room once or
twice, and that was enough. I knew in the flood of sudden illumination
that the girl had planned this thing in advance, with the daring of
despair--and a wife's despair, a very young wife's despair, is a more
desperate thing than the anger of any other woman. Natica had planned
it all in advance; had figured it, and the chances of it. And in the
balance she had confidently thrown the asset of my assisting her.

The right sort of a man, I suppose, would have become enraged because
of her taking things for granted. But I--I had been chained to her
chariot too long a time to experience the mild sensation of
resentment.

Natica wished to face her husband in a crowded restaurant after the
play. More than that, she wished to face him in company with a man not
of her sort, even as he--Drayton--was escorting a woman whose lane of
living did not rightly cross his. The coincidence of Natica's
means-to-an-end being the Hartopp's husband, was simply a gift of
fate; an opportunity of administering poetic justice, which could not
be denied. Had the Hartopp not possessed a convenient husband, Natica
would have arranged for another companion. But even she had not dared
to plan her _coup_ alone, with her chosen instrument of wifely
retaliation. Through it all, she had confidently counted on me, a
discreet background, a pliant puppet.

She could not know what Drayton might do,