erward, you were obliged to hide from
Blanche, exactly as you had hidden from me?"

"Worse even than that! A day or two later, Blanche took me into her
confidence. She spoke to me of her visit to the inn, as if I was a
perfect stranger to the circumstances. She told me to my face, Sir
Patrick, of the invisible man who had kept so strangely out of her
way--without the faintest suspicion that I was the man. And I never
opened my lips to set her right! I was obliged to be silent, or I must
have betrayed Miss Silvester. What will Blanche think of me, if I tell
her now? That's the question!"

Blanche's name had barely passed her husband's lips before Blanche
herself verified Sir Patrick's prediction, by reappearing at the open
French window, with the superseded white hat in her hand.

"Haven't you done yet!" she exclaimed. "I am shocked, uncle, to
interrupt you again--but these horrid hats of Arnold's are beginning to
weigh upon my mind. On reconsideration, I think the white hat with the
low crown is the most becoming of the two. Change again, dear. Yes! the
brown hat is hideous. There's a beggar at the gate. Before I go quite
distracted, I shall give him the brown hat, and have done with the
difficulty in that manner. Am I very much in the way of business? I'm
afraid I must appear restless? Indeed, I _am_ restless. I can't imagine
what is the matter with me this morning."

"I can tell you," said Sir Patrick, in his gravest and dryest manner.
"You are suffering, Blanche, from a malady which is exceedingly
common among the young ladies of England. As a disease it is quite
incurable--and the name of it is Nothing-to-Do."

Blanche dropped her uncle a smart little courtesy. "You might have told
me I was in the way in fewer words than that." She whisked round, kicked
the disgraced brown hat out into the veranda before her, and left the
two gentlemen alone once more.

"Your position with your wife, Arnold," resumed Sir Patrick, returning
gravely to the matter in hand, "is certainly a difficult one." He
paused, thinking of the evening when he and Blanche had illustrated
the vagueness of Mrs. Inchbare's description of the man at the inn, by
citing Arnold himself as being one of the hundreds of innocent people
who answered to it! "Perhaps," he added, "the situation is even more
difficult than you suppose. It would have been certainly easier for
_you_--and it would have looked more honorable in _her_ estimation--if
you had