one," he said insinuatingly. "More reliable
and steady with the rent. Settin' aside the young feller's weak eyes,
you're a nice-matched pair. Gittin' a license is easy, if you know the
ropes. I'd even be glad to go with you to--"

"As to not being married," broke in the butterfly, with the light of a
great resolve in her eye, "this gentleman may speak for himself. I am."

"Am what?" queried the Estate.

"Married."

"Damn!" exploded the young man. "I mean, congratulations and all that
sort of thing. I--I'm really awfully sorry. You'll forgive my making
such an ass of myself, won't you?"

To her troubled surprise there was real pain in the eyes which he turned
rather helplessly away from her. Had she kept her own gaze fixed on
them, she would have experienced a second surprise a moment later, at a
sudden alteration and hardening of their expression. For his groping
regard had fallen upon her left hand, which was gloved. Now, a wedding
ring may be put on and off at will, but the glove, beneath which it has
been once worn, never thereafter quite regains the maidenly smoothness
of the third finger. The butterfly's gloves were not new, yet there
showed not the faintest trace of a ridge in the significant locality.
While admitting to himself that the evidence fell short of
conclusiveness, the young man decided to accept it as a working theory
and to act, win or lose, do or die, upon the hopeful hypothesis that his
delightful but elusive companion was a li--that is to say, an inventor.
He would give that invention the run of its young life!

"We--ell," the Mordaunt Estate was saying, "that's too bad. Ain't a
widdah lady are you?"

"My husband is in France."

With a prayer that his theory was correct, the young man rushed in where
many an angel might have feared to tread. "Maybe he'll stay there,"
he surmised.

"What!"

In a musical but unappreciated barytone he hummed the initial line of
"The Girl I Left Behind Me."

"'The maids of France are fond and free.'

"Besides," he added, "it's quite unhealthy there at this season. I
wouldn't be surprised"--he halted--"at anything," he finished darkly.

Outraged by this ruthless if hypothetical murder of an equally
hypothetical spouse, she groped vainly for adequate words. Before she
could find them--

"I'll wait around--in hopes," he decided calmly.

So, that was the attitude this ruffian took with a respectable and
ostensibly married woman! And she had mistaken