take, is there any possibility of retracing your
steps?--or must you go on paying the penalty?"

Chip spoke without turning his eyes from the mountains: "What do you
mean by--the penalty?"

"I suppose I mean the necessity of making four people unhappy instead of
two."

"That is," Chip went on, "there are two who must be unhappy in any
case."

"Precisely. There are two for whom there's _no_ escape. Whatever happens
now, nothing can save _them_. But, since that is so, the question arises
whether it wouldn't be, let us say, a greater economy of human material
if the other two--"

Edith looked mystified. "I don't know what you mean. Which are the two
who must be unhappy in any case?"

Chip answered quietly, without turning his head: "He's one; my--my wife
is the other."

"Oh!" With something between a sigh and a gasp she fell back against a
pillar of the rotunda.

"It's the sort of economy of human material," Chip went on, his eye
following the lines of the Wetterhorn up and down, "that a man achieves
in saving himself from a sinking ship and leaving his wife and children
to drown--assuming that he can't rescue them."

"The comparison isn't quite exact," Lacon replied, courteously.
"Wouldn't it rather be that if a man can save only one of two women, he
nevertheless does what he can?"

Edith still looked bewildered. "I don't know what you're talking about,
either of you. What is it? Why are we here? Am I one of the two women to
be saved?"

"The suggestion is," Chip said, dryly, "that Mr. Lacon wouldn't oppose
your divorcing him, while my--my present wife might divorce me; after
which you and I could marry again. Isn't that it, sir?"

The older man nodded assent. "It's well to use plain English when we
can."

Chip continued to measure the Wetterhorn with his eye. "Rather comic the
whole thing would be, wouldn't it?"

"Possibly," Lacon replied, imperturbably. "But we've accepted the comic
in the institution of marriage, we Americans. It's too late for us to
attempt to take it without its possibilities of opera bouffe."

"But aren't there laws?" Edith asked.

Again Lacon's lips glimmered with the ghost of a smile. "Yes; but
they're very complacent laws. They reduce marriage to the legal
permission for two persons to live together as man and wife as long as
mutually agreeable; but the license is easily rescinded--and renewed."

"But surely marriage is more than that," she protested.

Lacon's ghost of a s