When Beatrice got up to go to the drawing-room he opened the door for her.  She blushed faintly as she went out.  When the door was shut, and the three men were alone, Bruce Evelin said to Dion: 

“Will you mind if Daventry and I talk a little shop to-night?”

“Of course not.  But would you rather I went up and kept Beattie company?”

“No; stay till you’re bored, or till you think Beatrice is bored.  Let us light up.”

He walked slowly, with his gently precise gait, to a cigar cabinet, opened it, and told the young men to help themselves.

“And now for the Clarke case,” he said.

“Is that the name of the woman from Constantinople?” asked Dion.

“Yes, Mrs. Beadon Clarke,” said Daventry.  “But she hates the Beadon and never uses it.  Beadon Clarke’s trying to divorce her, and I’m on her side.  She’s staying with Mrs. Chetwinde.  Esme Darlington, who’s an old friend of hers, thinks her too unconventional for a diplomatist’s wife.”

Bruce Evelin had lighted his cigar.

“We mustn’t forget that our friend Darlington has always run tame rather than wild,” he remarked, with a touch of dry satire.  “And now, Daventry, let us go through the main facts of the case, without, of course, telling any professional secrets.”

And he began to outline the Clarke case, which subsequently made a great sensation in London.

It appeared that Mrs. Clarke had come first to him in her difficulty, and had tried hard to persuade him to emerge from his retirement and to lead for her defense.  He had been determined in refusal, and had advised her to get Sir John Addington, with Daventry as junior.  This she had done.  Now Bruce Evelin was carefully “putting up” Daventry to every move in the great game which was soon to be played out, a game in which a woman’s honor and future were at stake.  The custody of a much-loved child might also come into question.

“Suppose Addington is suddenly stricken with paralysis in the middle of the case, you must be ready to carry it through triumphantly alone,” he observed, with quietly twinkling eyes, to Daventry.

“May I have a glass of your oldest brandy, sir?” returned Daventry, holding on to the dinner-table with both hands.

The brandy was given to him and the discussion of the case continued.  By degrees Dion found himself becoming strongly interested in Mrs. Clarke, whose name came up constantly.  She was evidently a talented and a very unusual woman.  Perhaps the latter fact partially accounted for the unusual difficulties in which she was now involved.  Her husband, Councilor to the British Embassy at Constantinople, charged her with misconduct, and had cited two co-respondents,—­Hadi Bey, a Turkish officer, and Aristide Dumeny, a French diplomat,—­both apparently men of intellect and of highly cultivated tastes, and both slightly younger than Mrs. Clarke.  A curious fact in the