“Of course you must say that!” And Kathleen Weir rose and laughed as she did so, and, having crossed the room, she opened an inlaid cabinet, and brought out some stall tickets and placed two in Webster’s hand.
“One is for to-morrow; the other for Friday—and good-by for the present; this has been your first visit to me, but I trust it will not be your last.”
“I am quite sure it will not if you give me permission to come.”
“I do give you permission; you will always be welcome here.”
They shook hands and parted; and after Webster was gone Kathleen Weir went to a mirror at one side of the room and looked at herself attentively.
“I wonder if he thinks me good-looking,” she was reflecting. “What a clever face he has! He is a man I think that a woman could be desperately in love with; that she could give up everything for, though more fool she! Luckily, I never fall in love, and I mean to stick to this in spite of Mr. Webster.”
In the meanwhile Ralph Webster had called a cab, and was being driven to Pembridge Terrace in—for him—a strange state of excitement. The story he had just heard—the story of a wife forsaken by a John Temple—had filled his mind with a sudden suspicion. Could this be the John Temple who had married the fair girl in secret, now living under his aunt’s roof? Was this the cause of his secrecy? This other wife, of whom he had tired, had left to fight her own way in the world. It seemed feasible, and if it were so, how was he himself to act? Could he throw a bombshell in this poor child’s path, and in a moment destroy all her happiness and hopes? But on the other hand—and Webster frowned and bit his lips.
“He must be a cursed scoundrel if he has wronged her so cruelly,” he muttered, and he determined during the evening to obtain from his aunts a complete personal description of the John Temple who had married May Churchill.
“No doubt Miss Weir has some portrait of her lost husband,” he thought a little scornfully; “but at all events he did not break her heart. Her description of a dead love was not bad. However, she is a woman I could not love.”
The woman he could love was in Miss Webster’s drawing-room alone when he entered it, and as he did so May held out her hand with a smile.