.

"Every bit as serious!--Oh! you should have let your sister marry him,
Mr. Quayle. Then he would have settled down, come into line with the
average, and been delivered from the morbid sense of outlawry which had
been growing on him--it couldn't be helped, on the whole he has kept
very creditably sane in my opinion--from the time he began to mix
freely in general society. I'm not very soft or sickly sentimental at
my time of day, but I tell you it turns my stomach to think of all he
must have gone through, poor chap. It's a merciless world, Miss St.
Quentin, and no one knows that better than we case-hardened old sinners
of doctors.--Yes, your sister should have married him, and we might
have been saved all this. I doubted the wisdom of the step at the time.
But I was a fool. I see now his mother's instinct was right."

Mr. Quayle pursed up his small mouth and gently shrugged his shoulders.

"It is a delicate subject on which to offer an opinion," he said. "I
debated it freely in the privacy of my inner consciousness at the time,
I assure you. If Lady Calmady had lighted upon the right, the uniquely
right, woman--perhaps--yes. But to shore up a twenty-foot, stone wall
with a wisp of straw,--my dear doctor, does that proceeding approve
itself to your common sense? And, as is a wisp of straw to such a wall,
so was my poor, little sister,--it's hardly flattering to my family
pride to admit it,--but thus indeed was she, and no otherwise, to
Dickie Calmady."

Whereupon Honoria glanced up gratefully at the speaker, for even yet
her conscience pricked her concerning the part she had played in
respect of that broken engagement. While John Knott, observant of that
upward glance, was once again struck by her manifest sincerity, and the
gallant grace of her, heightened by those workmanlike and
mud-bespattered garments. And, being so struck, he was once again
tempted by, and once again yielded himself to, the pleasures of
provocation.

"Marry him yourself, Miss St. Quentin," he growled, a touch of earnest
behind his raillery, "marry him yourself and so set the rest of us free
of the whole pother. I'd back you to handle him or any fellow living,
with mighty great success, if you'd the mind to!"

For a moment it seemed open to question whether that very fair fish
might not make short work of angler as well as of bait. But Honoria
relented, refusing provocation. And this not wholly in mercy to the
speaker, but because it offer