opposed his entrance, but quite ineffectually, at the
drawing-room door. Dick with his left hand was more than a match for the
Reverend Eustace. Warrender stood in the middle of the room, with his
head towards the sofa, over which his mother was bending, though his
eyes turned to the new-comers as they entered. He made a step towards
them as if to stop them, but a movement on the sofa drew him back again
as by some fascination. It was Geoff, who struggled up with a little
pale gray face and a cut on his forehead, like a little ghost. His
sharp voice piped forth all at once in the silence: "I told her, Mr.
Cavendish. I gave her your message. Oh, I'm all right, I'm all right.
But I told Chatty. I--I did what you said."

"Mr. Cavendish!" cried Mrs. Warrender, turning from the child. She was
trembling with the excitement of these hurrying events, though the sick
terror she had been seized with in respect to Geoff was passing away.
"Mr. Cavendish, my son is right in this,--that before you saw Chatty we
should have had an account of you, he and I."

"I should have said so too, in other circumstances," said Dick holding
Chatty's arm closely within his own. "If my presence or my touch could
harm her, even with the most formal fool,"--he flashed a look at Eustace,
angrily, which glowed over the pale parson like a passing lamp, but
left him quite unconscious. "As it is, you have a right to the fullest
explanation, but not to keep my wife from me for a moment."

"She is not your wife," cried Warrender. "Leave him, Chatty. Even in the
best of circumstances she cannot be your wife."

"Chatty, do not move. I have as full a right to hold her here as you
have, or any married man. Mrs. Warrender, I don't want to get angry. I
will tell you my story at once. On our wedding-day, when that terrible
interruption occurred, the poor creature whom I then thought, whom I
then believed, to have been----"

"You mean Mrs. Cavendish, your lawful wife."

"Poor girl, do not call her by that name; she never bore it. She did not
mean to do any harm. There was no sanctity to her in that or any other
tie."

Chatty pressed his arm more closely in sympathy. "Oh, Dick, I know, I
know."

"She meant no harm, from her point of view. She scarcely meant to deceive
me. Mrs. Warrender, it was a fiction all through. There has been no need
of any divorce. She was already married when--she made believe to marry
me. The delusion was mine alone. I hunted the m