n discussed
by the indifferent, are recalled with long faces and anxious whisperings
when a young girl's future is being discussed, and which make the
honourable marriage of daughters difficult of achievement.

Jacques de Wissant thanked the God of his fathers that Claire had
nothing in common with such women as those: he thought he did not need
her assurance to know that his honour, in the usual, narrow sense of the
phrase, was safe in her hands, but still her strange, imprudent words of
half-avowal racked him with jealous and, yes, suspicious pain.

Fortunately for him, he was a man burdened with much business, and so at
last he looked at his watch. Why, it was getting late--terribly late,
and he prided himself on his punctuality. Still, if he started now, at
once, he would be at the Hotel de Ville a few minutes before ten
o'clock, the time when the first of the civil marriages he had to
celebrate that morning was timed to take place.

Without passing through the house, he made his way rapidly round by the
gardens to the road, winding ribbon-wise behind the cliffs, where his
phaeton was waiting for him; for Jacques de Wissant had as yet resisted
the wish of his wife and the advice of those of his friends who
considered that he ought to purchase an automobile: driving had been
from boyhood one of his few pleasures and accomplishments.

But as he drove, keeping his fine black bays well in hand, the five
miles into the town, and tried to fix his mind on a commercial problem
of great importance with which he would be expected to deal that day,
Jacques de Wissant found it impossible to think of any matter but that
which for the moment filled his heart to the exclusion of all else. That
matter concerned his own relations to his wife, and his wife's relations
to Commander Dupre.

This gentleman of France was typical in more than one sense of his
nation and of his class--quite unlike, that is, to the fancy picture
which foreigners draw of the average Frenchman. Reserved and cold in
manner; proud, with an intense but never openly expressed pride in his
name and of what the bearers of it had achieved for their country;
obstinate and narrow as are apt to be all human beings whose judgment is
never questioned by those about them, Jacques de Wissant's fetish was
his personal honour and the honour of his name--of the name of Wissant.

In his distress and disturbance of mind--for his wife's half confession
had outraged his sen