“Is this widow the Isabella who once raised the devil with your Paul?” asked Grigsby.

“Same wench!” answered Sir Charles, a twinkle in his eye.

“Hum!” said the Captain—­and then said again, “Hum!” Then he added meditatively, “Blasted unlucky kiss that!  Likely wench enough, but—­never set the Thames on fire!—­nor me!”

“Oh the kiss didn’t count,” said Sir Charles.  “As I said to the boy’s mother at the time, a man isn’t obliged to marry every woman he kisses!  Mighty good thing, too—­eh, Grig?  Besides, a kiss like that is an insult to any flesh and blood woman!”

“An insult?”

“The worst kind!  You see, Grig, no woman likes to be kissed that way.  Whether she’s capable of feeling a single thrill of passion herself or not, she likes to be sure that she can inspire it in a man.  And a kiss like that—­well, it rouses all her fighting blood!  Makes her feel she’s no woman at all in the man’s eye—­merely a doll to be kissed.  D’ye see?  It’s damned inconsistent, of course, but it’s the woman of it!”

“The devil of it, you mean!” the old Captain chuckled in response.  Then, “Paul had a lucky escape,” he said, as he looked furtively around the room for listening ears, “mighty lucky escape!  And an experience right on the heels of it to make up for the loss of a hundred such wenches and—­say, Charles, he’s got a son to be proud of!  The Boy is certainly worth all the price!”

“Any price—­any price, Grig!” Then the old man went on, “If Henrietta only knew!  She thinks the world of the youngster, you know—­no one could help that—­but what if she knew?  Paul’s been mighty cautious.  I often laugh when I see them out together—­him and the Boy—­and think what a sensation one could spring on the public by letting the cat out of the bag.  And the woman would suffer.  Wouldn’t she, just!  Wouldn’t they tear her to pieces!”

“Yes, they would,” said the Captain, “they certainly would.  This is a world of hypocrites, Charles, damned rotten hypocrites!”

“That’s what it is, Grig!  Not one of those same old hens who would have said, ‘Ought we to visit her?’ and denounced the whole ‘immoral’ affair, and all that sort of thing—­not one of them, I say, but would—­”

“Give her very soul to know what such a love means!  O they would, Charles—­they would—­every damned old cat of them, who would never get an opportunity to play the questionable—­no, not one in a thousand years—­if they searched for it forever!”

“Yet women are made so, Grigsby—­they can’t help it!  Henrietta would faint at the mere suggestion of accepting as a daughter-in-law a woman with a past!”

And the old man sighed.

“I’d have given my eyes—­yes, I would, Grig—­to have seen that woman just once!  God! the man she made out of my boy!  Of course it may have been for the best that it turned out as it did, but—­damn it all, Grig, she was worth while!  There’s no dodging that!”