"I should hate to see him waste his life in a hole like this," said
Lady Alicia, not quite answering my question.

"Have you brought any great improvement to it?" I parried. Yet even as
I spoke I stood impressed by the thought that it was, after all, more
than primitive. It was paleolithic, two prehistoric she-things in
combat for their cave-man.

"That is not what I came here to discuss," she replied, with a tug at
one of her gauntlets.

"I suppose it would be nearer the mark to say, since you began by
being so plain-spoken, that you came here to ask me to give you my
husband," I retorted as quietly as I could, not because I preferred
the soft pedal, but because I nursed a strong suspicion that
Struthers' attentive ear was just below the nearest window-sill.

Lady Alicia smiled forbearingly, almost pityingly.

"Any such donation, I'm afraid, is no longer your prerogative," she
languidly remarked, once more mistress of herself. "What I'm more
interested in is your giving your husband his liberty."

I felt like saying that this was precisely what I had been giving him.
But it left too wide an opening. So I ventured, instead: "I've never
heard my husband express a desire for his liberty."

"He's too honorable for that," remarked my enemy.

"Then it's an odd kind of honor," I icily remarked, "that allows you
to come here and bicker over a situation that is so distinctly
personal."

"Pardon me, but I'm not bickering. And I'm not rising to any heights
of courage which would be impossible to your husband. It's consoling,
however, to know how matters stand. And Duncan will probably act
according to his own inclinations."

That declaration would have been more inflammatory, I think, if one
small truth hadn't gradually come home to me. In some way, and for
some reason, Lady Alicia Elizabeth Newland was not so sure of herself
as she was pretending to be. She was not so sure of her position, I
began to see, or she would never have thrown restraint to the winds
and come to me on any such mission.

"Then that counts me out!" I remarked, with a forlorn attempt at being
facetious. "If he's going to do as he likes, I don't see that you or I
have much to say in the matter. But before he does finally place his
happiness in your hands, I rather think I'd like to have a talk with
him."

"That remains with Duncan, of course," she admitted, in a strictly
qualified tone of triumph, as though she were secretly worrying over a