is for you to hear them. Were you and Miss Tuttle ever engaged?"

I started. This was a question which half of Washington had been
asking itself for the last three months.

Would Mr. Jeffrey answer it? or, remembering that these questions
were rather friendly than official, refuse to satisfy a curiosity
which he might well consider intrusive? The set aspect of his
features promised little in the way of information, and we were
both surprised when a moment later he responded with a grim
emphasis hardly to be expected from one of his impulsive temperament:

"Unhappily, no. My attentions never went so far."

Instantly the coroner pounced on the one weak word which Mr.
Jeffrey had let fall.

"Unhappily?" he repeated. "Why do you say, unhappily?"

Mr. Jeffrey flushed and seemed to come out of some dream.

"Did I say unhappily?" he inquired. "Well, I repeat it; Miss Tuttle
would never have given me any cause for jealousy."

The coroner bowed and for the present dropped her name out of the
conversation.

"You speak again of the jealousy aroused in you by your wife's
impetuosities. Was this increased or diminished by the tone of
the few lines she left behind her?"

The response was long in coming. It was hard for this man to lie.
The struggle he made at it was pitiful. As I noted what it cost
him, I began to have new and curious thoughts concerning him and
the whole matter under discussion.

"I shall never overcome the remorse roused in me by those few
lines," he finally rejoined. "She showed a consideration for me--"

"What!"

The coroner's exclamation showed all the surprise he felt. Mr.
Jeffrey tottered under it, then grew slowly pale as if only through
our amazed looks he had come to realize the charge of inconsistency
to which he had laid himself open.

"I mean--" he endeavored to explain, "that Mrs. Jeffrey showed an
unexpected tenderness toward me by taking all the blame of our
misunderstanding upon herself. It was generous of her and will
do much toward making my memory of her a gentle one."

He was forgetting himself again. Indeed, his manner and attempted
explanations were full of contradictions. To emphasize this fact
Coroner Z. exclaimed,

"I should think so! She paid a heavy penalty for her professed
lack of love. You believe that her mind was unseated?"

"Does not her action show it?"

"Unseated by the mishap occurring at her marriage?"

"Yes."

"You really think that?