r Thorpe. "Still, it's
too bad of her to go off with him to-night, when I'd promised you a
whole evening with her alone."

He winced. He was beginning to realize that evenings alone profited him
no more than evenings in company.

"Since you've broken your promise," he said severely, "I think you will
have to make me some reparation. This new dancing, now"--he mastered a
certain trepidation--"it looks easy, if unbeautiful. Do you think you
could teach it to me?"

She rose with alacrity. "Of course I could! I always learn things much
quicker than Jacky. You see it's taking three of them to teach her--two
to dance for her and one to dance with her--and I know the steps
already. Professor Jim," she said irrelevantly, with a faint sigh, "do
you think it pays to be clever?"

If Mrs. Kildare had noticed, she would have been more than a little
astonished by the vision of shy and awkward James Thorpe, one of the
leading psychologists of the country, capering nimbly in a lady's
chamber under the guidance of her eldest child. But she did not notice.

* * * * *

"Do you know what this means?" she said, after a long silence. "It means
that we have won, my dear. The very judge who tried him!"

Philip nodded, without speaking.

Her hand groped for his and clung to it. As the sisters of Lazarus must
have felt when he who was dead came to them out of the tomb in his
cere-cloths, so these two felt now. After seventeen years, the thing
they had vainly hoped and striven for was about to be granted--not
justice (it was too late for that), but mercy, freedom. And after
seventeen years, what was a man to do with freedom?

"I am--frightened, a little," Philip said at last, turning to her. "What
am I to do with father?"

"You are to bring him straight to me. No, I will go with you and bring
him home myself."

"_Home?_ To Basil Kildare's house?"

She lifted her head, "What matter whose house? We shall be married at
once."

He said in a low voice, "Have you forgotten--the will?"

"Forgotten it?" she laughed. "Do you think that likely? Why do you
suppose I have worked as I have, scheming, saving, paring corners--done
my own selling and buying and overseeing, driven my men and myself to
the limit of endurance, got for myself the reputation of a female
Shylock? Because I like that sort of thing? Because I enjoy making
money? No, my dear. When I rob my girls of their inheritance, as rob
them I must, I