"David! How long is this sort of thing to go on?" she asked, in a low, tense voice. "It's the talk of the whole town, and it can't be good for your child."

"But what would you have me do?" He had hoped that to-day--his sister's silver wedding day--his domestic trials would be forgotten, or, at any rate, not mentioned. "I can't dismiss Mary Scanlan now--she must stay on till Rosy goes to school. That won't be for very long, for, as you know, I promised"--he averted his face as he spoke--"to send the child to a convent school as soon as she was twelve years old."

The idea that her brother, the wealthy, highly-thought-of brewer of Market Dalling, should confess himself worsted by the old and ill-tempered Irishwoman, who, together with little Rosy, had been his wife's--his unfaithful wife's--only legacy to him, was horrible to his sister.

Even now, when bitter, disconnected thoughts crowded one on another, Mrs. Rigby, half-unconsciously, evoked in her mind the strong personality of the one human being who ever really "stood up" to her.

She had had the notion, so curiously common in England, that your Irishwoman is invariably slatternly, untruthful, and good-natured; but in Mary Scanlan she had found a human being as scrupulously neat, truthful, and high-minded as herself, while at the same time far more ill-tempered, and equally determined to have her own way.

While Mrs. Rigby was allowing a flood of very bitter thoughts to surge up round her, David Banfield was watching her face, and awaiting her next words with some anxiety.

But when Kate Rigby at last spoke, she seemed to have forgotten the immediate question under discussion.

"I suppose," she said slowly, "that you have never thought, Dave, that there might be a simple way out of your difficulties?"

"You mean that I might marry again? Well, Kate, yes--I have thought of it. I suppose there's no man, situated as I have been these last four years, but thinks of a second marriage as a way out; but--but, apart from other considerations, I don't feel as if I could bring myself to do it."

"And why not, pray?" asked Mrs. Rigby in a low voice.

"Well, it's difficult to explain the way I look at it. Of course, no one can answer for another, and yet, Kate, if anything happened to Matt, I don't see you marrying again----?"

David Banfield was aware that he had not chosen a very happy simile with which to point his meaning, and perhaps, in his heart of hearts, he hoped that what he had said would put an end to a painful discussion.

But any such hope was destined to be grievously disappointed, for his sister, with suddenly heightened colour, turned on him very sharply.

"Don't talk nonsense!" she exclaimed. "I'm an old woman, and you're a young man!" and she set back her vigorous, powerful shoulders.

"You know very well that if Matthew had dared to treat me as you were treated by Rosal----" something in her brother's face caused his wife's name to die away on her lips--"I should have felt myself free to do exactly what suited me best! Surely, when you go out among your grand county friends, you must meet nice young ladies who would be only too pleased to become Mrs. David Banfield, and to step into such a home as the Brew House?"

Mrs. Rigby looked eagerly, furtively, at her brother.

The way in which he had been welcomed, to a certain extent absorbed, in the rather dull county society round Market Dalling, had been, to his sister, a source of mingled pride and jealousy, the more so that it had begun in the days of his pretty wife, whose modest professional fame had preceded her, and made her a welcome addition to county gatherings and dinner-parties. Then had come the great break of the war, and in South Africa Banfield had been naturally thrown with the landowners of his own part of the world.

So it was that during the first few months which had followed on his return home, Mrs. Rigby had fully expected her brother to make another, maybe as disastrous a matrimonial experiment as before, and in a cla.s.s which was as little his own as that of his Irish wife had been.

But time had gone on, and David Banfield had shown no disposition to make a second marriage, either in the county set, or in the little town world of Market Dalling, where the Rigbys themselves lived and had their important being.

"Kate--you don't understand," he said at last, and, even as he uttered the words, they seemed to him painfully inadequate. "In fact, you never _did_ understand"--there came a sudden touch of pa.s.sion into his voice, and he got up and walked up and down the room--"how I felt--how for the matter of that I still feel--about Rosaleen. But for the war--but for the getting clear away--I don't know what I should have done! Once, when I was out there in a little out-of-the-way station, I saw an old bill with her name on it, put up, of course, before I met her, when she was touring in South Africa. Well, I can tell you one thing--if we had been back in the days when a soldier could get killed so much more easily than he can now, you would never have seen me again. For days and days I couldn't get her out of my mind--she's never out of my mind now----"

Mrs. Rigby was frightened, almost awed, not so much by the violence of his feeling, as by the outspoken expression of that feeling.

She got up and walked quickly to him.

"Perhaps I understand more than you think," she said in a moved voice, "but now, David, you must turn your back on all that. For good or evil, it's over and done with, and your duty is to your child. I won't say a word against Mary Scanlan,--I know she's been a faithful servant to you,--but wouldn't it be better for Rosy if you had someone who could look after the house, as well as after her? Even you admit that you cannot go on at the Brew House as you've been doing lately. I know you can't feel to anyone else as you felt to--to Rosaleen, but surely it would be best for the child, to say nothing of yourself, to have some kind, nice woman about the place, instead of one who's only a servant after all."

"Of course, it would be better," he said sombrely. "Don't you think I know that? But where am I to find the 'nice, kind woman'? As for the girls I meet, it's out of the question."

As he spoke, he unconsciously glanced round the room in which he and his sister were standing. Mrs. Rigby had not inherited the good taste which had distinguished her Banfield forefathers. The Brew House was full of fine old furniture, furniture which some of the young brewer's "grand"

friends envied him; but that which the Rigbys had gradually acc.u.mulated had the mean and yet rather pretentious commonness which belonged to the period in which they had married.

"There's one whom you've never thought of, but who often thinks of you,"

said Mrs. Rigby, her voice sinking to a whisper.

Banfield looked at his sister attentively. His fastidious mind pa.s.sed in review the various young women who composed the little society of Market Dalling. He regarded them all with indifference, rising in some cases to positive dislike, and since his matrimonial misfortunes he had, as far as was possible, avoided every kind of social gathering held in his native place.

"I don't know whom you mean," he said at last with some discomfiture.

"In the old days you were always apt to fancy that the girls were after me, and I can't say that you ever gave them much encouragement,"--he added with a rather clumsy attempt at playfulness.

"The person I have in my mind," persisted Mrs. Rigby, "isn't exactly a girl; she's just what we were talking about--a nice, kind woman--and you never seem to mind meeting her."

"Do you--can you possibly mean----"

"--Matilda Wellow? Yes, of course I do. It's astonishing to me, it's even surprising to Matthew, that you've never noticed how much she likes you. Why, she's the only person in Market Dalling who ever takes any trouble about little Rosy, or who ever gives the child anything; Rosy always calls her Auntie Tiddy."

"Matilda Wellow?" he repeated, honestly bewildered. "Why, of course I like her, and think well of her, but I've never thought of her--and don't believe she's ever thought of me, Kate--in that way!"

"Don't you?" she said drily. "There's none so blind as those who won't see."

Then, prompted by a shrewd instinct, she remained quite silent, and withdrew her anxious gaze from her brother's face.

Only to-day Banfield had received a letter from South Africa which had sorely tempted him to throw up everything and make a home in the country which, perhaps unfortunately for himself, held none of the glamour of the unknown. As a matter of fact, the letter was now in his pocket, and he felt guiltily aware of the angry pain with which his sister would regard the offer, especially if she guessed how tempting was its effect on his imagination.

But during their strange conversation he had realised, as he had never done before, that there were only two ways open to him--either to go away and make a new life, or to attempt some such solution of his troubles as that which his sister had just proposed to him.

So it was that during those moments of tense silence Matilda Wellow a.s.sumed in David Banfield's mind the importance of an only alternative.

Perhaps the very fact that the young man was so familiar with her personality, while always regarding her as a contemporary of his sister, made it easier for him to come to a sudden decision.

To another important fact--never forgotten for a moment by Mrs.

Rigby--namely, that Miss Wellow was the wealthiest spinster in Market Dalling, Banfield gave no thought, and it certainly played no part in his hurried, anxious self-communing.

"I confess," he said at last, "that this is a new idea to me--but that's no reason why it should be a bad idea. And if you really believe that it would be better for Rosy, and that Miss Wellow would not--" he hesitated awkwardly, "think it strange of me, I will do as you advise, Kate. But you must let me take my own time. Perhaps when she's heard what I've got to say, she won't feel about it as you believe she's likely to do. I cannot pretend that I--well, that I--" his lips refused to form the word--to him the infinitely sacred word--of love.

Mrs. Rigby was bewildered, awed into deep joy. No piece of good fortune which could have befallen herself would have given her so acute a feeling--it almost amounted to pain--of pa.s.sionate relief, and David Banfield, dimly gathering that it was so, felt exceedingly moved. Surely it was worth almost anything in the way of self-sacrifice to have brought such a look to his sister's face?

They both moved more closely to one another and she, so chary of caress, put her arms round his neck.

"I'm quite sure," she spoke with a catch in her voice, "quite, quite sure that you will never regret it! After all, life does get smoothed out, doesn't it? I'll tell you something about myself that I've never told anybody. Before Matthew came along, there was someone else I loved--loved, maybe, just as dearly as you loved Rosaleen."

"I know," said her brother, wincing at the sound of his late wife's name, "you mean Nat Bower?"

"Why, how did you ever guess that?" she asked, surprised.

"Oh! he used to take me walks when I was a kid, and he always talked about you."

Had Mrs. Rigby left the matter there, she would have been a wiser woman, but something prompted her to draw a moral.

"And don't you think I'm glad now?" she cried. "Think of what that poor fellow has become, and what Matthew is now!"

But this was too much for David Banfield.

"I don't think that's fair!" he exclaimed. "What you ought to say is--'Think of what that poor fellow might have become if he had married me!' I don't believe any man could have helped going straight with you, Kate. If I'd been more like you----"