and I'll take some of the
cocksureness out of you!"

Steingall soon gathered his scattered wits.

"Are you really speaking seriously, Mr. Curtis?" he asked.

"Quite seriously."

"Was this marriage an arranged affair?"

"Oh, yes. The marriage itself was prearranged."

"Candidly, I don't understand you."

"No? I am not surprised. But I do not wish you to remain under any
misapprehension as to the true state of affairs. Lady Hermione
Grandison meant to marry a French music-master named Jean de Courtois.
I thought, thought honestly but mistakenly, that the man was dead, and,
as it was of vital importance that her ladyship should get married
to-night, I offered my services as Jean de Courtois' substitute, and
they were accepted."

"Am I to take that statement as literally true?"

"Absolutely."

"You were not acquainted with the lady earlier?"

"No."

"Never seen or heard of her?"

"No."

"How did you come to engage in this--this freak marriage, then?"

Curtis measured Steingall with a contemplative eye.

"You are called on to assimilate a novel idea, and, in consequence, are
choosing your words badly," he said. "It was not a freak marriage.
Although I may have broken the laws of the State of New York by using a
license issued to some other person, Lady Hermione and I are legally
husband and wife, and no power on earth can dissolve the union without
the expressed consent of one or both of us."

"Do you mean me to accept the bald theory that you first learnt the
lady's name and address from a document discovered in another man's
overcoat, that you went to her house, told her the man was dead, and
suggested that you should become the bridegroom in his stead?"

"As an adjective, 'bald' is--well, bald. But you've got the affair
sized up accurately otherwise."

"Oh, the shameless hussy!" broke in Mrs. Horace vehemently.

Steingall turned on her with a certain heat of manner.

"Do not interrupt, madam, I beg," he exclaimed.

"Better reserve judgment, aunt, until you have met my wife," said
Curtis. He spoke gently enough. He had appraised his relatives almost
at a glance, and was sufficiently broad-minded to allow for the natural
distress of a respectable middle-aged lady who had been whirled, as it
were, out of her wonted environment, and rapt into the realms of
necromancy and Arabian Nights.

Steingall swept aside this intermission with the emphatic hand of a
cross-examining lawyer.

"You s