him, showing the quiet greatness of her nature in her tenderness towards this strong man in his sorrow.
“Kate, how can you bear this!”
“Bear it, dear?”
“Finding so much of the beast in me. My God, I thought the thing was dead; we are never dead, dear, to our father’s sins.”
She came and sat beside him before the fire, a man’s woman, pure, generous, trusty to the deeps. The light made magic in her hair, and showed the unfathomable faith within her eyes.
“Put the memory behind you,” she said, looking up into his face.
He groaned, as though dust and ashes still covered his manhood.
“You are too good to me, Kate.”
“No,” and she drew his hands down into her bosom; the warmth thereof seemed to comfort him as a mother’s breast comforts a child at night.
“I am glad you have told me—all.”
“Yes—all.”
“It helps me, it will help us both.”
“I ought to have told you long ago,” he said.
“But then—”
“I thought that I had killed the thing, and I loved you, dear, and perhaps I was a coward.”
She drew closer to him, leaning against his knee, while one of his strong arms went about her body. The warm darkness of the room seemed full of the sacred peace of home. They were both silent, silent for many minutes till the sound of children’s laughter came down from the rooms above.
James Murchison bent forward, and drew a deep breath as though in pain. The flash of sympathy was instant in its passage. Husband and wife were thinking the same thoughts.
“Kate, you must help me to fight this down—”
“Yes.”
“For their sakes, the children—for yours. I think that I have worked too hard of late. When the strength’s out of one, the devil comes in and takes command. And the servants, you are sure—?”
She felt the spasmodic girding of all his manhood, and yearned to him with all her heart.
“They knew nothing; I saved that. Don’t let us talk of it; the thing is over”—and she tried not to shudder. “Ah—I am glad I know, dear, I can do so much.”
James Murchison bent down and drew her into his arms, and she lay there awhile, feeling that the warmth of her love passed into her husband’s body. The hearth was red before them with the fire-light, and they heard the sound of their children playing.
“Shall we go up to them?” she said, at last.
“Yes”—and she knew by his face that he was praying, not with mere words, but with every life-throb of his being—“it will do me good. God bless you—”
And they kissed each other.
CHAPTER III
Mrs. Betty Steel sat alone at the breakfast-table with a silver teapot covered with a crimson cosy before her, and a pile of letters and newspapers at her elbow. The west front of St. Antonia’s showed through the window, buttress and pinnacle glimmering up into the morning sunlight. Frost-rimed trees spun a scintillant net against the blue. The quiet life of the old town went up with its lazy plumes of smoke into the crisp air.
Mrs. Betty Steel drew a slice of toast from the rack, toyed with it, and looked reflectively at her husband’s empty chair. She was a dark, sinuous, feline creature was Mrs. Betty, with a tight red mouth, and an olive whiteness of skin under her black wreath of hair. Her hands were thin, mercurial, and yet suggestive of pretty and graceful claws. A clever woman, cleverer with her head than with her heart, acute, elegant, aggressive, yet often circuitous in her methods. She had abundant impulse in her, blood, and clan, even evidenced by the way in which she ripped the wrapper from a copy of the Wilmenden Mail.
Mrs. Betty buried her face in the pages, crumbling her toast irritably as her eyes ran to and fro over the head-lines. She glanced up as her husband entered, a smooth-faced, compressed, and professional person, with an assured manner and an incisive cut of the mouth and chin.
“Any news in this hub of monotony?”
His wife put down the paper, and called back the dog who was poking his nose near the bacon-dish on the fire-guard.
“Quack medicines much in evidence. The fellows are arrant Papists, Parker; they promise to cure everything with nothing. Tea or coffee?”
Mrs. Betty spoke with the slight drawl that was habitual to her. Her admirers felt it to be distinguished, but its effect upon shop assistants was to spread the instincts of socialism.
Dr. Parker Steel declared for coffee, and took salt to his porridge. He was not a man who wasted words, save perhaps on the most paying patients. Professional ambition, and an aggressive conviction that he was to be the leading citizen in Roxton filled the greater part of the gentleman’s sphere of consciousness.
“And local sensations?”
“Mrs. Pindar’s ball, a very dull affair, sausage-rolls and jelly, and a floor like glue—probably.”
“Any one there?”
“The Lombard Street clique, the Carnabys, Tom Flemming, Kate Murchison, etc., etc., etc.”
Parker Steel grunted, and appeared to be estimating the number of cubes in the sugar bowl by way of exercising himself in the compilation of statistics.
“Murchison not there, I suppose?” he asked.
“The wife—quite sufficient.”
Her husband smiled, showing the regular white teeth under his trim, black mustache with scarcely any flow of feeling in his features. Dr. Parker Steel was very proud of his teeth and finger-nails.
“You don’t love that lady much, eh?”
Mrs. Betty’s refined superciliousness trifled with the suggestion.
“Kate Murchison? I cannot say that I ever trouble much about her. Rather fat and vulgar—perhaps. Fat women do not appeal to me; they seem to carry sentimentality and gush about with them like patchouli. Do you think that you are gaining ground on Murchison, Parker, eh?”
The husband appeared confident.
“Perhaps.”
“Old Hicks will resign the Hospital soon; you must take it.”
“Not worth the trouble.”
Mrs. Betty’s dark eyes
