e simply can't give you a straight
answer.'

'Then everything he told me last night, I suppose, was mendacious: he
delivered himself of a series of the stiffest statements. They stuck,
when I tried to swallow them, but I never thought of so simple an
explanation.'

'No doubt he was in the vein,' Sir David went on. 'It's a natural
peculiarity--as you might limp or stutter or be left-handed. I believe
it comes and goes, like intermittent fever. My son tells me that his
friends usually understand it and don't haul him up--for the sake of his
wife.'

'Oh, his wife--his wife!' Lyon murmured, painting fast.

'I daresay she's used to it.'

'Never in the world, Sir David. How can she be used to it?'

'Why, my dear sir, when a woman's fond!--And don't they mostly handle
the long bow themselves? They are connoisseurs--they have a sympathy for
a fellow-performer.'

Lyon was silent a moment; he had no ground for denying that Mrs.
Capadose was attached to her husband. But after a little he rejoined:
'Oh, not this one! I knew her years ago--before her marriage; knew her
well and admired her. She was as clear as a bell.'

'I like her very much,' Sir David said, 'but I have seen her back him
up.'

Lyon considered Sir David for a moment, not in the light of a model.
'Are you very sure?'

The old man hesitated; then he answered, smiling, 'You're in love with
her.'

'Very likely. God knows I used to be!'

'She must help him out--she can't expose him.'

'She can hold her tongue,' Lyon remarked.

'Well, before you probably she will.'

'That's what I am curious to see.' And Lyon added, privately, 'Mercy on
us, what he must have made of her!' He kept this reflection to himself,
for he considered that he had sufficiently betrayed his state of mind
with regard to Mrs. Capadose. None the less it occupied him now
immensely, the question of how such a woman would arrange herself in
such a predicament. He watched her with an interest deeply quickened
when he mingled with the company; he had had his own troubles in life,
but he had rarely been so anxious about anything as he was now to see
what the loyalty of a wife and the infection of an example would have
made of an absolutely truthful mind. Oh, he held it as immutably
established that whatever other women might be prone to do she, of old,
had been perfectly incapable of a deviation. Even if she had not been
too simple to deceive she would have been too proud; and if she had