o?"

"You--you threw away my ring. You said it was all--all over."

"Well? Couldn't I say that without driving you to act the madman? No
one but a madman would have gone out of this house and--" She clasped
her forehead in her hands with a dramatic lifting of the arms. "Oh!
It's too much! I don't care about myself. But to have it on your
conscience that a man has thrown his life away----"

He asked meekly, "What good was it to me when you wouldn't have it?"

She stamped her foot. "Rash, you'll drive me insane. Your life might
be no good to you at all, and yet you might give it a chance for
twenty-four hours--that isn't much, is it?--before you--" She caught
herself up. "Tell me. You don't mean to say that you're _married_?"

He nodded.

"To whom?"

"Her first name is Letty. I've forgotten the second name."

"Where did you find her?"

"Over there in the Park."

"And she went and married you--like that?"

"She was all alone--chucked out by a stepfather----"

She burst into a hard laugh. "Oh, you baby! You believed that? The
kind of story that's told by nine of the----"

[Illustration: BY THE TIME HE HAD FINISHED, HIS HEART WAS A LITTLE EASED
AND SOME OF HER TENDERNESS BEGAN TO FLOW TOWARD HIM]

He interrupted quickly. "Don't call her anything, Barbe--I mean any
kind of a bad name. She's all right as far as that goes. There's a
kind that couldn't take you in."

"There's _no_ kind that couldn't take _you_ in!"

"Perhaps not, but it's the one thing in--in this whole idiotic
business that's on the level--I mean she is. I'd give my right hand to
put her back where I found her yesterday--just as she was--but she's
straight."

She dropped into a chair. The first wild tumult of rage having more or
less spent its force, she began, with a kind of heart-broken
curiosity, to ask for the facts. She spoke nervously, beating a palm
with a gold tassel of her girdle. "Begin at the beginning. Tell me all
about it."

He leaned on the mantelpiece, of which the only ornaments were a
child's head in white and blue terra cotta by Paul Manship, balanced
by a pair of old American glass candlesticks, and told the tale as
consecutively as he could. He recounted everything, even to the
bringing her home, the putting her in the little, back spare-room, and
her adoption by Beppo, the red cocker spaniel. By the time he had
finished, his heart was a little eased, and some of her tenderness
toward him was beginning to flow forth.