"Why," I repeated, "are you so much interested in those kids?"
"Don't be an ass!" he grunted, looking down upon the wet tablecloth, and a spasm as of pain crossed his countenance.
"Ah, you see!" I laughed, attempting to lighten his mood.
"Randolph," he uttered in a strange solemn tone that sent a slight thrill through me. "I told you once there was a woman I had cared about—and only one."
"Yes—but you never married her."
"No," he continued in the etiolated tone of a dead grief. "She was married already when I knew her."
And then my sympathy went out to grizzled old Dibdin.
"I am sorry," I murmured, touching his hand across the table. "Did I know her?"
"Yes," he said quietly, "you knew her. It was Laura."
In a flash of poignantly bitter and vain regret I saw the vista of the dead years—of what might have been! ...