“You mustn’t do that,” she said.  “Suppose my husband were to see you.”

“Oh, bother!” he said.  “I don’t know why it is, but I don’t seem to realize you’re a married woman.”

“Am I playing the part so badly as all that?”

“Is it a part?” he cried eagerly.

She shook her head.  His face fell again.  She could hardly fail to note the change.

“No, it’s a stern reality,” she said.  “I wish it wasn’t.”

It seemed a bold confession, but it was easy to understand.  Sam had been an old school-fellow of his, and David had not thought highly of him.  He was silent a moment.

“Are you not happy?” he said gently.

“Not in my marriage.”

“Sam must be a regular brute!” he cried indignantly.  “He doesn’t know how to treat you.  He ought to have his head punched the way he’s going on with that fat thing in red.”

“Oh, don’t run her down,” said Hannah, struggling to repress her emotions, which were not purely of laughter.  “She’s my dearest friend.”

“They always are,” said David oracularly.  “But how came you to marry him?”

“Accident,” she said indifferently.

“Accident!” he repeated, open-eyed.

“Ah, well, it doesn’t matter,” said Hannah, meditatively conveying a spoonful of trifle to her mouth.  “I shall be divorced from him to-morrow.  Be careful!  You nearly broke that plate.”

David stared at her, open-mouthed.

“Going to be divorced from him to-morrow?”

“Yes, is there anything odd about it?”

“Oh,” he said, after staring at her impassive face for a full minute.  “Now I’m sure you’ve been making fun of me all along.”

“My dear Mr. Brandon, why will you persist in making me out a liar?”

He was forced to apologize again and became such a model of perplexity and embarrassment that Hannah’s gravity broke down at last and her merry peal of laughter mingled with the clatter of plates and the hubbub of voices.

“I must take pity on you and enlighten you,” she said, “but promise me it shall go no further.  It’s only our own little circle that knows about it and I don’t want to be the laughing-stock of the Lane.”

“Of course I will promise,” he said eagerly.

She kept his curiosity on the qui vive to amuse herself a little longer, but ended by telling him all, amid frequent exclamations of surprise.

“Well, I never!” he said when it was over.  “Fancy a religion in which only two per cent. of the people who profess it have ever heard of its laws.  I suppose we’re so mixed up with the English, that it never occurs to us we’ve got marriage laws of our own—­like the Scotch.  Anyhow I’m real glad and I congratulate you.”

“On what?”

“On not being really married to Sam.”

“Well, you’re a nice friend of his, I must say.  I don’t congratulate myself, I can tell you.”