and heart.  What you lack is Sabe—­common-sense.  You’ll get that, too, in time, and meanwhile I’m not going to stand by and see you cut up and fed to the dogs for want of it.  I’ll get you through this scrape, and put you on your feet again, right-side-up-with care, because, as I said, I like you.  I like your wife, too, mind.  She’s a good, honest little soul, and she worships the very ground you tread on.  Of course, as long as people will marry in their teens, the wrong people will get yoked up together.  But that’s neither here nor there.  She’s a kind sweet little body, and she’s devoted to you, and it isn’t every intellectual man that gets even that much.  But now it’s a go, is it?  You promise to keep quiet, do you, and leave the whole show absolutely to me?  Shake hands on it.”

Sister Soulsby had risen, and stood now holding out her hand in a frank, manly fashion.  Theron looked at the hand, and made mental notes that there were a good many veins discernible on the small wrist, and that the forearm seemed to swell out more than would have been expected in a woman producing such a general effect of leanness.  He caught the shine of a thin bracelet-band of gold under the sleeve.  A delicate, significant odor just hinted its presence in the air about this outstretched arm—­something which was not a perfume, yet deserved as gracious a name.

He rose to his feet, and took the proffered hand with a deliberate gesture, as if he had been cautiously weighing all the possible arguments for and against this momentous compact.

“I promise,” he said gravely, and the two palms squeezed themselves together in an earnest clasp.

“Right you are,” exclaimed the lady, once more with cheery vivacity.  “Mind, when it’s all over, I’m going to give you a good, serious, downright talking to—­a regular hoeing-over.  I’m not sure I shan’t give you a sound shaking into the bargain.  You need it.  And now I’m going out to help Alice.”

The Reverend Mr. Ware remained standing after his new friend had left the room, and his meditative face wore an even unusual air of abstraction.  He strolled aimlessly over, after a time, to the desk by the window, and stood there looking out at the slight figure of Brother Soulsby, who was bending over and attentively regarding some pink blossoms on a shrub through what seemed to be a pocket magnifying-glass.

What remained uppermost in his mind was not this interesting woman’s confident pledge of championship in his material difficulties.  He found himself dwelling instead upon her remark about the incongruous results of early marriages.  He wondered idly if the little man in the white tie, fussing out there over that rhododendron-bush, had figured in her thoughts as an example of these evils.  Then he reflected that they had been mentioned in clear relation to talk about Alice.