ied! I've been married to a policeman. Why, Jim, do you know what
I've spent on myself, really spent? Not two thousand, not one thousand,
not five hundred dollars a year. I've been poorer than my own clerk. I'd
hate to tell you what I paid for cigars and whisky. Everything went to
her, everything! And Jim--" he turned suddenly with a significant
glance--"such a temper!"

"A temper? No, impossible, not that!"

"Not violent--oh, no--but firm--smiling, you know, but irresistible."

He drew a long breath charged with bitter memories and said between his
teeth, rebelling: "I always agreed."

"Can it be? Is it possible?" commented De Gollyer, carefully mastering
his expression.

Lightbody, on the new subject of his wrongs, now began to explode with
wrath.

"And there's one thing more--one thing that hurts! You know what she
eloped in? She eloped in a hat, a big red hat, three white feathers--one
hundred and seventy-five dollars. I gave up a winter suit to get it."

He strode over to the grotesquely large hat-box on the slender table,
and struck it with his fist.

"Came this morning. Jim, she waited for that hat! Now, that isn't right!
That isn't delicate!"

"No, by Jove, it certainly isn't delicate!"

"Domesticity! Ha!" At the moment, with only the long vision of petty
tyranny before him, he could have caught her up in his hands and
strangled her. "Domesticity! I've had all I want of domesticity!"

Suddenly the eternal fear awakening in him, he turned and commanded
authoritatively:

"Never tell!"

"Never!"

De Gollyer, at forty-two, showed a responsive face, invincibly, gravely
sympathetic, patiently awaiting his climax, knowing that nothing is so
cumulatively dangerous as confession.

Lightbody took up his glass and again approached it to his lips,
frowning at the thought of what he had revealed. All at once a fresh
impulse caught him, he put down his glass untasted, blurting out:

"Do you want to know one thing more? Do you want to know the truth, the
real truth?"

"Gracious heavens, there is something more?"

"I never married her--never in God's world!"

He ceased and suddenly, not to be denied, the past ranged itself before
him in its stark verity.

"She married me!"

"Is it possible?"

"She did!"

What had been an impulse suddenly became a certainty.

"As I look back now, I can see it all--quite clear. Do you know how it
happened? I called three times--not one time more--three times! I li