moment when I was just saying to myself--as soon as I saw you--that
you'd speak the truth for _me_!"

"Ah, what's the matter with 'you'?" Julia sighed with an impatience
not sensibly less sharp for her having so quickly scented some lion in
her path.

"Why, do you think there's no one in the world but you who has seen
the cup of promised affection, of something really to be depended on,
only, at the last moment, by the horrid jostle of your elbow, spilled
all over you? I want to provide for my future too as it happens; and
my good friend who's to help me to that--the most charming of women
this time--disapproves of divorce quite as much as Mr. French. Don't
you see," Mr. Pitman candidly asked, "what that by itself must have
done toward attaching me to her? _She_ has got to be talked to--to be
told how little I could help it."

"Oh, lordy, lordy!" the girl emulously groaned. It was such a
relieving cry. "Well, _I_ won't talk to her!" she declared.

"You _won't_, Julia?" he pitifully echoed. "And yet you ask of
_me_--!"

His pang, she felt, was sincere; and even more than she had guessed,
for the previous quarter of an hour he had been building up his hope,
building it with her aid for a foundation. Yet was he going to see how
their testimony, on each side, would, if offered, _have_ to conflict?
If he was to prove himself for her sake--or, more queerly still, for
that of Basil French's high conservatism--a person whom there had been
no other way of dealing with, how could she prove him, in this other