Everybody knew it, alack! But he was really not such a fool--such a heartless fool--as this story implied! Mrs.Meadows had been taken in--willingly taken in--had exaggerated everything she said for her own purposes.

The mother's wrath indeed was rapidly rising to the smiting point, when a change in the narrative arrested her.
"And then--I couldn't help it!"-- there was a new note of agitation in Doris's voice--"but what had happened was so _horrid_--it was so like seeing a man going to ruin under one's eyes, for, of course, one knew that she would get hold of him again--that I ran out after your son and begged him to break with her, not to see her again, to take the opportunity, and be done with her! And then he told me quite calmly that he _must_ marry her, that he could not help himself, but he would never live with her.

He would marry her at a registry office, provide for her, and leave her.

And then he said he would do it _at once_--that he was going to his lawyers to arrange everything as to money and so on--on condition that she never troubled him again.

He was eager to get it done--that he might be delivered from her--from her company--which one could see had become dreadful to him.