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