errupted Grant, "so you will
oblige me by not raising too many points at once. Why should you imagine
that conversation with you in particular should add to my supposed
distress?"

"Doesn't it?"

"No."

"Why, then, may I ask, do you so obviously resent my questions? Who has
so much right to put them as I?"

Grant found that he must bestir himself. Thus far, the honors lay with
this rather sinister-looking yet quiet-mannered visitor.

"I am sorry if anything I have said lends color to that belief," he
answered. "Candidly, I began by assuming that you forfeited any legal
right years ago to interfere in behalf of Miss Melhuish, living or dead.
Let us, at least, be candid with each other. Miss Melhuish herself told
me that you and she had separated by mutual consent."

"Allow me to emulate your candor. The actual fact is that you weaned my
wife's affections from me."

"That is a downright lie," said Grant coolly.

Ingerman's peculiar temperament permitted him to treat this grave
insult far more lightly than Grant's harmless, if irritating, reference
to the police.

"Let us see just what 'a lie' signifies," he said, almost judicially. "If
a lady deserts her husband, and there is good reason to suspect that she
is, in popular phrase, 'carrying on' with another man, how can the
husband be lying if he charges that man with being the cause of the
domestic upheaval?"

"In this instance a hypothetical case is not called for. Three years ago,
Mr. Ingerman, you had parted from your wife. Your name was never
mentioned. Apparently, none in my circle had even heard of you. Miss
Melhuish had won repute as a celebrated actress. I met her, in a sense,
professionally. We became friends. I fancied I was in love with her. I
proposed marriage. Then, and not until then, did the ghost of Mr."--Grant
bent forward, and consulted the card--"Mr. Isidor G. Ingerman intrude."

"So marriage was out of the question?"

"If you expect an answer--yes."

Ingerman rested the handle of his stick against his lips.

"That isn't how the situation was represented to me at the time," he said
thoughtfully.

Grant was still sore with the recollection of the way in which the
superintendent of police had forced him to confess the pitiful scheme
whereby a woman in love had sought to gain her ends. He refused to sully
her memory a second time that day, even to gain the upper hand in this
troublesome controversy.

"I neither know nor care what repr