“You reason upon the assumption that ignorance is bliss,” said Mr. Aylett.  “Allow me to express the opinion that the adage embodying that idea is the refuge of cowards and fools.  No matter how grievous a bankrupt a man may be financially in spirit, he is craven or a blockhead to shrink the investigation of his accounts.  Which allusion to bankruptcy brings me to the recital of a choicely offensive bit of scandal I heard to-day.  It is seldom that I give heed to the like, but the delicious rottenness revealed by this tale enforced my hearing, and fixed the details in my mind.  I could not but think, as I rode home, of the accessories which would add effectiveness, to-night, to my second-hand narrative.  I had the whole scene, which is now before me, in my mind’s eye—­the warm firelight and the shaded lamp brightening all within, while the rain pattered without; the interesting invalid over there gradually stirring into interest as the story progressed; you, Mabel, calmly and critically attentive; and my Lady Aylett, too proud to look the desire she really feels to handle the lovely carrion.”

“Your figures are not provocative of insatiable appetite,” returned his wife, with inimitable sang-froid, staying her paper knife that she might examine an engraving.

“Your appetite needs further excitants, then?  So did mine until I began to suspect that the history might be authentic, and not a figment of the raconteur’s imagination.  The hero’s name at first disposed me to set down the entire relation as a fiction.  It is romantic enough to perfume a three-volume novel—­Julius Lennox!”

Mabel’s instinctive thought was for her husband, but, in turning to him she could not but notice that Mrs. Aylett sat motionless, the paper-cutter between two leaves, and her left hand pressed hard upon the upper, but without attempting to sever them.

Herbert twisted his head upon the pillow until he faced the back of the sofa, and a convulsion went through him, hardly quelled by the clasp of Mabel’s hand upon his.

“Julius Lennox!” reiterated Mr. Aylett, between the fragrant puffs, “A lieutenant in the navy—­the good-looking, but, as the sequel proved, not over-steady, spouse of a lady who was the daughter of another naval officer of similar rank.  The latter was compelled to leave the service on account of incipient idiocy, and retired, upon half-pay, to an unfashionable quarter of a certain great city, where his wife, a smart Yankee, opened a boarding-house for law and medical students, and contrived not only to keep the souls and bodies of her family together, but to marry off her two still single daughters—­the one to a barrister, the other to a physician.  The lovely Louise Lennox—­a pretty alliteration, is it not?—­remained meanwhile under the paternal roof, her husband’s ship being absent most of the time, and the handsome Julius having unlimited privileges in the line condemned by “Black-eyed Susan” in her parting interview with her sailor