conquest too incredibly facile.

"He knows, of course, that you came to talk this over with me?" I
suggested, as though it were an after-thought.

"He had nothing to do with my coming," asserted Lady Alicia.

"Then it was your own idea?" I asked.

"Entirely," she admitted.

"Then what did you hope to gain?" I demanded.

"I wasn't considering my own feelings," imperially acknowledged her
ladyship.

"That was very noble of you," I admitted, "especially when you bear in
mind that you weren't considering mine, either! And what's more, Lady
Newland, I may as well tell you right here, and right now, that you
can't get anything out of it. I gave up my home to you, the home I'd
helped make by the work of my own hands. And I gave up the hope of
bringing up my children as they ought to be brought up. I even gave up
my dignity and my happiness, in the hope that things could be made to
come out straight. But I'm not going to give up my husband. Remember
that, I'm not going to give him up. I don't care what he says or
feels, at this particular moment; I'm not going to give him up to make
a mess of what's left of the rest of his life. He may not know what's
ahead of him, _but I do_! And now that you're shown me just what you
are, and just what you're ready to do, I intend to take a hand in
this. I intend to fight you to the last ditch, and to the last drop of
the hat! And if that sounds primitive, as you've already suggested,
it'll pay you to remember that you're out here in a primitive country
where we're apt to do our fighting in a mighty primitive way!"

It was a very grand speech, but it would have been more impressive, I
think, if I hadn't been suddenly startled by a glimpse of Whinstane
Sandy's rock-ribbed face peering from the bunk-house window at almost
the same moment that I distinctly saw the tip of Struthers' sage-green
coiffure above the nearest sill of the shack. And it would have been a
grander speech if I'd stood quite sure as to precisely what it meant
and what I intended to do. Yet it seemed sufficiently climactic for my
visitor, who, after a queenly and combative stare into what must have
looked like an ecstatically excited Fourth-of-July face, turned
imperially about and swung open the door of her motor-car. Then she
stepped up to the car-seat, as slowly and deliberately as a sovereign
stepping up to her throne.

"It may not be so simple as it seems," she announced with great
dignity, as she proceeded to