was as little addicted to coquetry as the statue of Washington in Union Square, or the steeple of Trinity Church; and that in the midst of flattery and adulation she was the same proud, cold, suffering, almost broken-hearted wife she had always appeared in her conferences with me.  Induging this belief, I have accepted the joint guardianship of her daughter, on condition that whenever it becomes necessary to receive her under my immediate protection, I shall be made acquainted with her real name.”

“Thank you, my dear sir, for your frankness, which I would most joyfully reciprocate, were I not bound by a promise to make no revelations until she gives me permission, or her death unseals my lips.  I hope you fully comprehend my awkward position.  There is a conspiracy to defraud her and her child of their social and legal rights, and I fear both will be victimized; but she insists that secrecy will deliver her from the snares of her enemies.  I suppose you are aware that General——­”

He paused, and bit his lip, and again the lawyer’s handsome mouth disclosed his perfect teeth.

“There is no mischief in your dropped stitch; I shall not pick it up.  I know that Mrs. Orme’s husband is in Europe, and I was assured that motives of a personal character induced her to make certain professional engagements in England and upon the Continent.  I am not enthusiastic, and rarely venture prophecies, but I shall be much disappointed if her Richelieu tactics do not finally triumph.”

“Can you tell me why she does not openly bring suit against her husband for bigamy?”

“Simply because she has been informed that the policy of the defence would be to at once attack her reputation, which she seems to guard with almost morbid sensitiveness on account of her daughter.  She has been warned of the dangerous consequences of a suit, but if forced to extremities will hazard it; hence I bide my time.”

He threw back his lordly head, and his brilliant eyes seemed to dilate, as though the suggestion of the suit stirred his pulse, as the breath of carnage and the din of distant battle that of the war-horse, panting for the onward dash.

A species of human petrel,—­a juridic Procellaria Pelagica whose habitat was the court-house,—­Erle Palma lived amid the ceaseless surges of litigation, watching the signs of rising tempests in human hearts, plunging in defiant exultation where the billows rode highest, never so elated as when borne triumphantly upon the towering crest of some conquering wave of legal finesse, or impassioned invective, and rarely saddened in the flush of victory by the pale spectres of strangled hope, fortune, or reputation which float in the debris of the wrecks that almost every day drift mournfully away from the precincts of courts of justice.

The striking of the clock caused him to draw out his watch and compare the time.