he raised her voice. "Madame Max will
tell you all about it, duke. She knows him very well."

"You know him very well; do you? Dear, dear, dear!"

"I don't know him at all, duke, but I once went to hear him preach.
He's one of those men who string words together, and do a good deal
of work with a cambric pocket-handkerchief."

"A gentleman?" asked the duke.

"About as like a gentleman as you're like an archbishop," said Lady
Glencora.

This tickled the duke amazingly. "He, he, he;--I don't see why I
shouldn't be like an archbishop. If I hadn't happened to be a duke,
I should have liked to be an archbishop. Both the archbishops take
rank of me. I never quite understood why that was, but they do. And
these things never can be altered when they're once settled. It's
quite absurd, now-a-days, since they've cut the archbishops down so
terribly. They were princes once, I suppose, and had great power. But
it's quite absurd now, and so they must feel it. I have often thought
about that a good deal, Glencora."

"And I think about poor Mrs. Arch, who hasn't got any rank at all."

"A great prelate having a wife does seem to be an absurdity," said
Madame Max, who had passed some years of her life in a Catholic
country.

"And the man is a cad;--is he?" asked the duke.

"A Bohemian Jew, duke,--an impostor who has come over here to make a
fortune. We hear that he has a wife in Prague, and probably two or
three elsewhere. But he has got poor little Lizzie Eustace and all
her money into his grasp, and they who know him say that he's likely
to keep it."

"Dear, dear, dear!"

"Barrington says that the best spec he knows out, for a younger son,
would be to go to Prague for the former wife, and bring her back with
evidence of the marriage. The poor little woman could not fail of
being grateful to the hero who would liberate her."

"Dear, dear, dear!" said the duke. "And the diamonds never turned up
after all. I think that was a pity, because I knew the late man's
father very well. We used to be together a good deal at one time. He
had a fine property, and we used to live--but I can't just tell you
how we used to live. He, he, he!"

"You had better tell us nothing about it, duke," said Madame Max.

The affairs of our heroine were again discussed that evening in
another part of the Priory. They were in the billiard-room in the
evening, and Mr. Bonteen was inveighing against the inadequacy of the
law as it had been brought t