l have you make good your insinuations. You shall disabuse
this lady's mind. You shall--damn you!--or I'll compel you!"

Mr. Caryll smiled very engagingly. The matter was speeding
excellently--a comedy the like of which he did not remember to have
played a part in since his student days at Oxford, ten years and more
ago.

"I had thought," said he, "that the woman who summoned me to be
a witness of this--this--ah wedding"--there was a whole volume of
criticism in his utterance of the word--"was the landlady of the 'Adam
and Eve.' I begin to think that she was this lady's good angel; Fate,
clothed, for once, matronly and benign." Then he dropped the easy,
bantering manner with a suddenness that was startling. Gallic fire
blazed up through British training. "Let us speak plainly, my Lord
Rotherby. This marriage is no marriage. It is a mockery and a villainy.
And that scoundrel--worthy servant of his master--is no parson; no, not
so much as a hedge-parson is he. Madame," he proceeded, turning now to
the frightened lady, "you have been grossly abused by these villains."

"Sir!" blazed Rotherby at last, breaking in upon his denunciation, hand
clapped to sword. "Do ye dare use such words to me?"

Mr. Jenkins got to his feet, in a slow, foolish fashion. He put out a
hand to stay his lordship. The lady, in the background, looked on with
wide eyes, very breathless, one hand to her bosom as if to control its
heave.

Mr. Caryll proceeded, undismayed, to make good his accusation. He had
dropped back into his slightly listless air of thinly veiled persiflage,
and he appeared to address the lady, to explain the situation to her,
rather than to justify the charge he had made.

"A blind man could have perceived, from the rustling of his prayer
book when he fumbled at it, that the contents were strange to him. And
observe the volume," he continued, picking it up and flaunting it aloft.
"Fire-new; not a thumbmark anywhere; purchased expressly for this foul
venture. Is there aught else so clean and fresh about the scurvy thief?"

"You shall moderate your tones, sir--" began his lordship in a snarl.

"He sets you each on the wrong side of him," continued Mr. Caryll, all
imperturbable, "lacking even the sense to read the directions which the
book contains, and he has no thought for the circumstance that the time
of day is uncanonical. Is more needed, madame?"

"So much was not needed," said she, "though I am your debtor, sir."

He