"Took the roundabout way?" finished the bachelor, helpfully.

The widow nodded.

"I have written him," she explained, "that he mustn't—that it would be best if he wouldn't come here any more. That will keep him in his place, I think."

"On his knees?" inquired the bachelor sarcastically.

"And I told him," proceeded the widow, with a reproachful glance at the bachelor, "how very rude and foolish——"

"Did you explain," interrupted the bachelor, "that the foolishness consisted in not taking the kiss?"

"Mr. Travers!"[95]

[95]

"And that the rudeness lay entirely in assuming that you might not want to be——"

"How dare you!" cried the widow, flaming as red as the scarlet satin sofa pillow behind her head. "I gave him a dreadful scolding!" she added, looking pensively at the sealed note and toying with the edge of the flap, as though she half wished it would come open again.

"In other words," remarked the bachelor laconically, "having him down, you proceeded to wipe your feet on him. Since he had turned the left cheek, you made him turn all the way round, so that you could stick pins in his back and make him feel like the thirty-second vertebræ and——"

"I had to, Mr. Travers," cried the[96] widow pleadingly. "It was my duty."

[96]

"Your—what?"

"To teach him a lesson," explained the widow promptly. "He's got to learn that in the situation between man and woman there's only one throne and that whoever gets up on it first wields the sceptre. He's got to learn that the conquest of woman is not, like the Battle of Waterloo, an affair of strategy, but like the Battle of Bunker Hill or Sennacherib——"

"Or the Boston Tea Party or the Massacre of the Innocents," broke in the bachelor. "But aren't you a little hard on the girl? If you get him too well trained he'll beat her."

"Well," replied the widow promptly, "if he does she'll adore him. Besides, it's much better to have the matrimonial medicine administered[97] in allopathic doses than in the little homeopathic pellets of 

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