“H’m!” said he.

There was another silence.  The colonel desperately felt that matters were not advancing.

“H’m!” said she, with something of interrogation in her voice.

“See here, Clarice, I have known you——­”

“You have not!” cried she, very earnestly; “not by five years!”

“Well, say for some time.  You are a sensible woman——­”

“A man,” Mrs. Pendomer lamented, parenthetically, “never suspects a woman of discretion, until she begins to lose her waist.”

“—­and I am sure that I can rely upon your womanly tact, and finer instincts,—­and that sort of thing, you know—­to help me out of a deuce of a mess.”

Mrs. Pendomer ate on, in an exceedingly noncommittal fashion, as he paused, inquiringly.

“She has been reading some letters,” said he, at length; “some letters that I wrote a long time ago.”

“In the case of so young a girl,” observed Mrs. Pendomer, with perfect comprehension, “I should have undoubtedly recommended a judicious supervision of her reading-matter.”

“She was looking through an old escritoire,” he explained; “Jack Charteris had suggested that some of my father’s letters—­during the War, you know—. might be of value—­”

He paused, for Mrs. Pendomer appeared on the verge of a question.

But she only said, “So it was Mr. Charteris who suggested Patricia’s searching the desk.  Ah, yes!  And then—?”

“And it was years ago—­and just the usual sort of thing, though it may have seemed from the letters—­Why, I hadn’t given the girl a thought,” he cried, in virtuous indignation, “until Patricia found the letters—­and read them!”

“Naturally,” she assented—­“yes,—­just as I read George’s.”

The smile with which she accompanied this remark, suggested that both Mr. Pendomer’s correspondence and home life were at times of an interesting nature.

“I had destroyed the envelopes when she returned them,” continued Colonel Musgrave, with morose confusion of persons.  “Patricia doesn’t even know who the girl was—­her name, somehow, was not mentioned.”

“‘Woman of my heart’—­’Dearest girl in all the world,’” quoted Mrs. Pendomer, reminiscently, “and suchlike tender phrases, scattered in with a pepper-cruet, after the rough copy was made in pencil, and dated just ‘Wednesday,’ or ‘Thursday,’ of course.  Ah, you were always very careful, Rudolph,” she sighed; “and now that makes it all the worse, because—­as far as all the evidence goes—­these letters may have been returned yesterday.”

“Why—!” Colonel Musgrave pulled up short, hardly seeing his way clear through the indignant periods on which he had entered.  “I declined,” said he, somewhat lamely, “to discuss the matter with her, in her present excited and perfectly unreasonable condition.”

Mrs. Pendomer’s penciled eyebrows rose, and her lips—­which were quite as red as there was any necessity for their being—­twitched.