“I never heard that,” Messner said. “You remember the case, Mrs. Haythorne?”

“Perfectly,” she answered, in a voice the control of which was in amazing contrast to the anger that blazed in the face she turned aside so that Haythorne might not see.

The latter was again on the verge of asking his name, when Messner remarked:

“This Dr. Womble, I’ve heard he was very handsome, and-er-quite a success, so to say, with the ladies.”

“Well, if he was, he finished himself off by that affair,” Haythorne grumbled.

“And the woman was a termagant-at least so I’ve been told. It was generally accepted in Berkeley that she made life-er-not exactly paradise for her husband.”

“I never heard that,” Haythorne rejoined. “In San Francisco the talk was all the other way.”

“Woman sort of a martyr, eh?-crucified on the cross of matrimony?”

The doctor nodded. Messner’s gray eyes were mildly curious as he went on:

“That was to be expected-two sides to the shield. Living in Berkeley I only got the one side. She was a great deal in San Francisco, it seems.”

“Some coffee, please,” Haythorne said.

The woman refilled his mug, at the same time breaking into light laughter.

“You’re gossiping like a pair of beldames,” she chided them.

“It’s so interesting,” Messner smiled at her, then returned to the doctor. “The husband seems then to have had a not very savory reputation in San Francisco?”

“On the contrary, he was a moral prig,” Haythorne blurted out, with apparently undue warmth. “He was a little scholastic shrimp without a drop of red blood in his body.”

“Did you know him?”

“Never laid eyes on him. I never knocked about in university circles.”

“One side of the shield again,” Messner said, with an air of weighing the matter judicially.