t the issue. One and one don't make one in the
state of matrimony any more than elsewhere on the globe, and whether he
and his wife agree or disagree doesn't interest me in the slightest.
What does concern me is the important fact that the mistress of the
executive mansion of the great state of New York appears not to know
certain things she ought, chief among them the true character of
ex-Senator Ludlow."

"I'm afraid it's true," owned the canon.

"Before Ruth Graves left I suggested that she intercede. She has tact,
knows the Shelbys well, and had received an invitation to visit them.
But she declined visit, intercession, and all. I'm sorry. Somebody
must speak to Mrs. Shelby, and an old acquaintance could carry off such
a mission with better grace."

"Why didn't Graves come on with his wife?" inquired the canon,
irrelevantly.

"Don't mention the simpleton! I've no patience with him--or with Ruth
for marrying him. We never can see the reason for other people's
marriages, but that one above all others was incomprehensible. If ever
a woman needed to marry a dynamo to bring out her best it was Ruth
Temple. And she married Bernard Graves--a man who has degenerated into
a _poseur_ before women's clubs. Marriages made in heaven indeed!
Give me Darwin and natural selection."

"You really have something of the kind," laughed North. "She was a
free agent, his plumage evidently attracted in the old, old way, and so
she made her choice."

"Fiddlesticks! Don't tell me that she made a fool of herself of her
own free will. That man isn't capable of stirring the emotions of a
poster girl with orange skin and purple hair, let alone a flesh and
blood woman. Something outside herself--don't laugh; I'm a woman and I
know--somebody, not Graves himself, bred that folly. If she were
another sort of nature, I'd say she married for spite; but she--"

"For respite, perhaps--respite from herself. I've known cases. But
we're far afield from the Shelbys. Shall I approach the governor?"

"No," said Mrs. Van Dam, with decision. "The wife is the one to see,
if I know anything of women, and this is a woman's task; I, clearly, am
the instrument, and shall not shirk."

"You would have made an eminent surgeon," remarked North, with his slow
smile.

The unflinching Good Samaritan selected an hour two days later when the
governor's wife was likely to be alone, and sent up her card. Not a
few women had sighed for a sight of