“What shall I do—­what can I do, Mr. Bowen?” he gasped, bewildered.

“Consult an attorney,” advised Mr. Bowen promptly.

“I’ll do it,” shouted “Bobby” Browne, one time halfback on his college eleven.  “Break the will for me, Mr. Bowen, and I’ll give—­”

“I can’t break it, Bobby.  I’m its executor.”

“Good Lord!  Well, then, who is the best will-breaker you know, please?  Something has to be done right away.”

“I’m afraid you don’t grasp the situation.  Now if you were not married it would—­”

“I wouldn’t give up my wife for all the islands in the universe.  That’s settled.  You don’t know how happy we are.  She’s the—­”

“Yes, yes, I know,” interrupted the wily Mr. Bowen.  “Don’t tell me about it.  She’s a stumbling block, however, even though we are agreed that she’s a most delightful one.  Your co-legatee also possesses a block, perhaps not so delicate, but I daresay she feels the same about hers as you do about yours.  I can’t advise you, my boy.  Go and see Judge Garrett over in the K——­ building.  They say he expects to come back from the grave to break his own will.”

Ten minutes later an excited young man rushed into an office in the K——­ building.  Two minutes afterward he was laying the case before that distinguished old counsellor, Judge Abner Garrett.

“You will have to fight it jointly,” said Judge Garrett, after extracting the wheat from the chaff of Browne’s remarks.  “You can’t take hers away from her and she can’t get yours.  We must combine against the natives.  Come back to-morrow at two.”

Promptly at two Browne appeared, eager-eyed and nervous.  He had left behind him at home a miserable young woman with red eyes and choking breath who bemoaned the cruel conviction that she stood between him and fortune.

“But hang it all, dearest, I wouldn’t marry that girl if I had the chance.  I’d marry you all over again to-day if I could,” he had cried out to her, but she wondered all afternoon if he really meant it.  It never entered her head to wonder if Lady Deppingham was old or young, pretty or ugly, bright or dull.  She had been Mrs. Browne for three months and she could not quite understand how she had been so happy up to this sickening hour.

Judge Garrett had a copy of the will in his hand.  He looked dubious, even dismayed.

“It’s as sound as the rock of Gibraltar,” he announced dolefully.

“You don’t mean it!” gasped poor Bobby, mopping his fine Harvard brow, his six feet of manhood shrinking perceptibly as he looked about for a chair in which to collapse.  “C—­can’t it be smashed?”

“It might be an easy matter to prove either of these old gentlemen to have been insane, but the two of them together make it out of the question——­”

“Darned unreasonable.”

“What do you mean, sir?” indignantly.

“I mean—­oh, you know what I mean.  The conditions and all that.  Why, the old chumps must have been trying to prove their grandchildren insane when they made that will.  Nobody but imbeciles would marry people they’d never seen.  I——­”