odd but opportune melting. He placed his
arm around her shoulders. She tried to escape it, but with a coy, shy
movement, half hysterical, half girlish, unlike her usual stony, moral
precision. "Yes, Joan," he repeated, laughingly, "but whose fault is it?
Not HIS, remember! And I firmly believe he thinks you can do him good."

"But he has never seen me," she continued, with a nervous little laugh,
"and probably considers me some old Gorgon--like--like--Sister Jemima
Skerret."

Blandford smiled with the complacency of far-reaching masculine
intuition. Ah! that shrewd fellow, Demorest, was right. Joan, dear Joan,
was only a woman after all.

"Then he'll be the more agreeably astonished," he returned, gayly, "and
I think YOU will, too, Joan. For Dick isn't a bad-looking fellow; most
women like him. It's true," he continued, much amused at the novelty
of the perfectly natural toss and grimace with which Mrs. Blandford
received this statement.

"I think he's been pointed out to me somewhere," she said, thoughtfully;
"he's a tall, dark, dissipated-looking man."

"Nothing of the kind," laughed her husband. "He's middle-sized and as
blond as your cousin Joe, only he's got a long yellow moustache, and
has a quick, abrupt way of talking. He isn't at all fancy-looking; you'd
take him for an energetic business man or a doctor, if you didn't know
him. So you see, Joan, this correct little wife of mine has been a
little, just a little, prejudiced."

He drew her again gently backwards and nearer his seat, but she caught
his wrists in her slim hands, and rising from the chair at the same
moment, dexterously slipped from his embrace with her back towards him.
"I do not know why I should be unprejudiced by anything you've told me,"
she said, sharply closing the book of sermons, and, with her back still
to her husband, reinstating it formally in its place on the cabinet.
"It's probably one of his many scandalous pursuits of defenceless and
believing women, and he, no doubt, goes off to Boston, laughing at you
for thinking him in earnest; and as ready to tell his story to anybody
else and boast of his double deceit." Her voice had a touch of human
asperity in it now, which he had never before noticed, but recognizing,
as he thought, the human cause, it was far from exciting his
displeasure.

"Wrong again, Joan; he's waiting here at the Independence House for me
to see him to-morrow," he returned, cheerfully. "And I believe him so