“You’ll be losing the ring next,” muttered Lethbury; but Mr. Budd produced this article punctually, and a moment or two later was bearing its wearer captive down the aisle.

At the wedding-breakfast Lethbury caught his wife’s eye fixed on him in mild disapproval, and understood that his hilarity was exceeding the bounds of fitness.  He pulled himself together, and tried to subdue his tone; but his jubilation bubbled over like a champagne-glass perpetually refilled.  The deeper his draughts, the higher it rose.

It was at the brim when, in the wake of the dispersing guests, Jane came down in her travelling-dress and fell on her mother’s neck.

“I can’t leave you!” she wailed, and Lethbury felt as suddenly sobered as a man under a douche.  But if the bride was reluctant her captor was relentless.  Never had Mr. Budd been more dominant, more aquiline.  Lethbury’s last fears were dissipated as the young man snatched Jane from her mother’s bosom and bore her off to the brougham.

The brougham rolled away, the last milliner’s girl forsook her post by the awning, the red carpet was folded up, and the house door closed.  Lethbury stood alone in the hall with his wife.  As he turned toward her, he noticed the look of tired heroism in her eyes, the deepened lines of her face.  They reflected his own symptoms too accurately not to appeal to him.  The nervous tension had been horrible.  He went up to her, and an answering impulse made her lay a hand on his arm.  He held it there a moment.

“Let us go off and have a jolly little dinner at a restaurant,” he proposed.

There had been a time when such a suggestion would have surprised her to the verge of disapproval; but now she agreed to it at once.

“Oh, that would be so nice,” she murmured with a great sigh of relief and assuagement.

Jane had fulfilled her mission after all:  she had drawn them together at last.

THE RECKONING

I

“THE marriage law of the new dispensation will be:  Thou shalt not be unfaithful—­to thyself.”

A discreet murmur of approval filled the studio, and through the haze of cigarette smoke Mrs. Clement Westall, as her husband descended from his improvised platform, saw him merged in a congratulatory group of ladies.  Westall’s informal talks on “The New Ethics” had drawn about him an eager following of the mentally unemployed—­those who, as he had once phrased it, liked to have their brain-food cut up for them.  The talks had begun by accident.  Westall’s ideas were known to be “advanced,” but hitherto their advance had not been in the direction of publicity.  He had been, in his wife’s opinion, almost pusillanimously careful not to let his personal views endanger his professional standing.  Of late, however, he had shown a puzzling tendency to dogmatize, to throw down the gauntlet, to flaunt his private code in the face of society; and the relation of the sexes being a topic always sure of an audience, a few admiring friends had persuaded him to give his after-dinner opinions a larger circulation by summing them up in a series of talks at the Van Sideren studio.