es, I will lie," said Orlando.

"Well, there she is," I said; "and God bless you both."

CHAPTER X

IN WHICH ONCE MORE I BECOME OCCUPIED IN MY OWN AFFAIRS

During a pause in my matrimonial lecture, Orlando had written a little
farewell note to Sylvia,--a note which, of course, I didn't read, but
which it is easy to imagine "wild with all regret." This I undertook
to have delivered to her the same night, and promised to call upon her
on the morrow, further to illuminate the situation, and to offer her
every consolation in my power. To conclude the history of Orlando and
his Rosalind, I may say that I saw them off from Yellowsands by the
early morning coach. There was a soft brightness in their faces, as
though rain had fallen in the night; but it was the warm sweet rain of
joy that brings the flowers, and is but sister to the sun. They are, at
the time of my writing, quite old friends of mine, and both have an
excessive opinion of my wisdom and good-nature.

"That lie," Orlando once said to me long after, "was the truest thing I
ever said in my life,"--a remark which may not give the reader a very
exalted idea of his general veracity.

As the coach left long before pretty young actresses even dreamed of
getting up, I had to control my impatient desire to call on
Mademoiselle Sylvia Joy till it was fully noon. And even then she was
not to be seen. I tried again in the afternoon with better success.

Rain had been falling in the night with her too, I surmised, but it had
failed to dim her gay eyes, and had left her complexion unimpaired. Of
course her little affair with Orlando had never been very serious on
her side. She genuinely liked him. "He was a nice kind boy," was the
height of her passionate expression, and she was, naturally, a little
disappointed at having an affectionate companion thus unexpectedly
whisked off into space. Her only approach to anger was on the subject
of his deceiving her about his wife. Little Sylvia Joy had no very
long string of principles; but one generous principle she did hold
by,--never, if she knew it, to rob another woman of her husband. And
that did make her cross with Orlando. He had not played the game fair.

There is no need to follow, step by step, the progression by which
Sylvia Joy and I, though such new acquaintances, became in the course
of a day or two even more intimate than many old friends. We took to
each other instinctively, even on our first rather