s in Sir Oliver."

"'Tis that you should be spared such a discovery that I am beseeching
you not to wed him."

"Yet unless I wed him I shall never make such a discovery; and until I
make it I shall ever continue to love him and to desire to wed him. Is
all my life to be spent so?" She laughed outright, and came to stand
beside him. She put an arm about his neck as she might have put it about
the neck of her father, as she had been in the habit of doing any day in
these past ten years--and thereby made him feel himself to have reached
an unconscionable age. With her hand she rubbed his brow.

"Why, here are wicked wrinkles of ill-humour," she cried to him. "You
are all undone, and by a woman's wit, and you do not like it."

"I am undone by a woman's wilfulness, by a woman's headstrong resolve
not to see."

"You have naught to show me, Sir John."

"Naught? Is all that I have said naught?"

"Words are not things; judgments are not facts. You say that he is so,
and so and so. But when I ask you upon what facts you judge him,
your only answer is that you think him to be what you say he is. Your
thoughts may be honest, Sir John, but your logic is contemptible." And
she laughed again at his gaping discomfiture. "Come, now, deal like an
honest upright judge, and tell me one act of his--one thing that he has
ever done and of which you have sure knowledge--that will bear him out
to be what you say he is. Now, Sir John!"

He looked up at her impatiently. Then, at last he smiled.

"Rogue!" he cried--and upon a distant day he was to bethink him of those
words. "If ever he be brought to judgment I can desire him no better
advocate than thou."

Thereupon following up her advantage swiftly, she kissed him. "Nor could
I desire him a more honest judge than you."

What was the poor man to do thereafter? What he did. Live up to her
pronouncement, and go forthwith to visit Sir Oliver and compose their
quarrel.

The acknowledgment of his fault was handsomely made, and Sir Oliver
received it in a spirit no less handsome. But when Sir John came to the
matter of Mistress Rosamund he was, out of his sense of duty to her,
less generous. He announced that since he could not bring himself to
look upon Sir Oliver as a suitable husband for her, nothing that he had
now said must mislead Sir Oliver into supposing him a consenting party
to any such union.

"But that," he added, "is not to say that I oppose it. I disapprove,
but I stand