The Young Doctor smiled. “It’s only her way of saying that my mind is unhinged and that I ought to be sent to a private hospital for two.”
“No—only one,” returned Kitty.
“Marriage means common catastrophe, doesn’t it?” he asked quizzically.
“Generally it means that one only is permanently injured,” replied Kitty, lifting a tumbler and looking through it at him as though to see if the glass was properly polished.
Mona was mystified. At first she thought there had been oblique references to her husband, but these remarks about marriage would certainly exclude him. Yet, would they exclude him? During the time in which Shiel’s history was not known might there not have been—but no, it could not have been so, for it was Kitty who had sent the letter which had brought her to Askatoon.
“Are you to be married—soon?” she asked of Kitty, with a friendly yet trembling smile, for her agitation was, despite appearances, troubling every nerve.
“I’ve thought of it quite lately,” responded Kitty calmly, seating herself now and looking straight into the eyes of the woman, who was suggesting more truth than she knew.
“May I congratulate you? Am I justified on such slight acquaintance? I am sure you have chosen wisely,” was the smooth rejoinder.
Kitty did not shrink from looking Mona in the eyes. “It isn’t quite time for congratulations yet, and I’m not sure I’ve chosen wisely. My family very strongly disapproves. I can’t help that, of course, and I may have to elope and take the consequences.”
“It takes two to elope,” interposed the Young Doctor, who thought that Kitty, in her humorous extravagance, was treading very dangerous ground indeed. He was thinking of Crozier and Kitty; but Kitty was thinking of Crozier, and meaning John Sibley. Somehow she could not help playing with this torturing thing in the presence of the wife of the man who was the real “man in possession” so far as her life was concerned.