ed
and sent off to prison for a most flagrant breach of the peace! Still, if
she can keep quiet, I will do so."

"All right, old rooster!" laughed the woman. "It is your play now, and I
give you your turn! Down with your best card!"

"Neighbors," continued Col. Anglesea, fully controlling himself, and
falling into that confidential tone which he had always found so
effectual--"neighbors, I call upon you, in common justice to me, to use
your reason and judgment in this matter. You see this woman who has
brought forward this most absurd, preposterous, and, I must say,
humiliating claim to be my wife. For it is most humiliating, indeed, that
any of you should have the faintest shadow of a suspicion that she may be
telling the truth. Why, gentlemen, I am from England. She says she is from
California. I never was in California in all the days of my life. I never
set eyes on this woman before this hour. She is no more my wife than she
is the empress of India. I call upon you to look at her, and ask
yourselves if it is at all likely or possible that she could, under any
circumstances, be--what she claims to be. You see her appearance; you see
her conduct; you hear her speech; is it likely--is it possible--that I
could have married such a person? You see the absurdity of the thing. No,
gentlemen; this person is a lunatic, laboring under some fantastic
hallucination, or she is an impostor, conspiring, with others, to
blackmail me. I demand, in the name of justice, that she be arrested and
sent to prison for her flagrant breach of the peace in her outrageous
assault upon me this morning."

The colonel, who had completely mastered his emotions, spoke with such
candor, judgment and authority that the men present whispered together,
and seemed almost inclined to think that they had committed a shameful
indiscretion in suspecting so gallant an officer and so perfect a
gentleman of any impropriety, on the mere word of a strange woman, who was
certainly not a lady.

The stranger saw the tide of sentiment, or of opinion, turning, and her
black eyes sparkled, her blooming cheeks glowed and her red lips wreathed
in a mocking smile, as she said:

"I declare! If you haven't played the right bower! And you have very
nearly took the trick, only for my little joker. Here it is, gentlemen!
See me take this trick! Here! Here's the joker!"

And, with these words, she took a folded parchment from her pocket, and
handed it to the rector.