ture too as it happens; and
my good friend who's to help me to that--the most charming of women
this time--disapproves of divorce quite as much as Mr. French. Don't
you see," Mr. Pitman candidly asked, "what that by itself must have
done toward attaching me to her? _She_ has got to be talked to--to be
told how little I could help it."

"Oh, lordy, lordy!" the girl emulously groaned. It was such a
relieving cry. "Well, _I_ won't talk to her!" she declared.

"You _won't_, Julia?" he pitifully echoed. "And yet you ask of
_me_--!"

His pang, she felt, was sincere; and even more than she had guessed,
for the previous quarter of an hour he had been building up his hope,
building it with her aid for a foundation. Yet was he going to see how
their testimony, on each side, would, if offered, _have_ to conflict?
If he was to prove himself for her sake--or, more queerly still, for
that of Basil French's high conservatism--a person whom there had been
no other way of dealing with, how could she prove him, in this other
and so different interest, a mere gentle sacrifice to his wife's
perversity? She had, before him there, on the instant, all acutely, a
sense of rising sickness--a wan glimmer of foresight as to the end of
the fond dream. Everything else was against her, everything in her
dreadful past--just as if she had been a person represented by some
"emotional actress," some desperate erring lady "hunted down" in a
play; but was that going to be the case too with her own very decency,
the fierce little residuum deep within her, for which she was
counting, when she came to think, on so little glory or even credit?
Was this also going to turn against her and trip her up--just to show
she was really, under the touch and the test, as decent as any one;
and with no one but herself the wiser for it meanwhile, and no proof
to show but that, as a consequence, she should be unmarried to the
end? She put it to Mr. Pitman quite with resentment: "Do you mean to
say you're going to be married--?"

"Oh, my dear, I too must get engaged first!"--he spoke with his
inimitable grin. "But that, you see, is where you come in. I've told
her about you. She wants awfully to meet you. The way it happens is
too lovely--that I find you just in this place. She's coming," said
Mr. Pitman--and as in all the good faith of his eagerness now; "she's
coming in about three minutes."

"Coming here?"

"Yes, Julia--right here. It's where we usually meet"; an