udge remarked,--

"My servant gave your name as Mrs. Clark--did she not make a mistake?"

"No," Adelle said, "That is what I shall call myself now--Mrs. Adelle
Clark."

The judge murmured something behind his hand. Hers was another of these
modern mishaps, it seemed, falsely called marriages. Each case of
divorce gave his old heart a little stab, wounding a loyalty to a
beautiful ideal that he had kept intact. But he was old enough and wise
enough, having judged men and women all his life, not to pronounce
judgment on the most intimate and secret of all human affairs. He waited
for Adelle to tell her story, and presently she began.

"Judge Orcutt," she said, "I want to tell you something and ask your
advice because I feel that you will know what to do."

With this introduction she proceeded to retell her story, the one she
had told that morning to the officers of the trust company. But having
been over it once she told it much better to the judge, more coherently,
more fully, with many small, intimate, revealing touches that she had
omitted before. It was easier for her to talk to the old man, who
listened with warm, understanding eyes, and nodded his white head when
she cut to the quick of things as if he understood why without being
told everything precisely. She felt that she could tell him everything,
all her own life, all that she was but now beginning to comprehend and
see as a whole. He had for her the lure of the confessor, and Adelle
needed a confessor.

So she described to him briefly the course of her married life up to the
time when she first began to notice the mason at work upon the terrace
wall. Without accusing Archie, she made the judge nevertheless
comprehend why she no longer could bear his name. From her first meeting
with her cousin she was much more detailed in her story, giving
everything chronologically, anxious to omit nothing which might be of
importance. She told all the circumstances of her slow comprehension of
the truth, that this stone mason was her second cousin and should have
inherited equally with herself the riches of Clark's Field. She told
squarely of her weeks of hesitation and final decision not to reveal to
the mason or to any one her knowledge of the truth. Then came the night
of the fire and her personal tragedy in the ruin of Highcourt. And all
this she told, dry-eyed, without passion, quite baldly, as if that was
the only way in which she could face it. Lastly she told