"Ah, Miss Rothwell," he said, looking up at her, "I wanted to have had the right to care for her and mourn her, but it was not to be!"
"No," said Kate. "I'm sorry," she added, after a moment. It was just at the time when she herself was about to defy all the barren traditions of the Rothwells to marry Sidney Harding with his brilliant prospects of wealth. Harding's half-brother, who had made the great business, was pleased with the match, and promised Sidney a partnership in a couple of years. Everything was bright for Kate, and she could afford a regretful thought to poor Hayes. "I'm sorry," she said.
Her voice was hard, but the slightest proffer of sympathy was enough. "Ah! I knew you wished me well—God bless you!" said the little man, "and help you as you would have helped me!"
Perhaps Kate Rothwell felt that at that rate Providence would not take any very active interest in her affairs. She turned aside impatiently. "Pray keep your thanks for some one who deserves them, Mr. Hayes. I don't."
"You could not do anything, but I know you were good to her. She told me, that afternoon——" He spoke in just the proper tone of emotion.
"Nonsense!" Kate answered, sharply. "How could she? there was nothing to tell." Mr. Hayes might well say, even a quarter of a century later, that Miss Rothwell had an unpleasant manner.
Nevertheless she held a place in that idealised picture of his love which in his old age served him for a memory. In Sidney Harding's death, within a year of the marriage, he saw a kindred stroke to that which had robbed him of his own hope, and he never thought of Kate without a touch of sentimental loyalty. When he met Kate's son that October afternoon, with the familiar face and voice, on his way to Mitchelhurst, he had felt that, Rothwell though he was, he must be welcomed for his mother's sake. And yet it had almost seemed as if it were John Rothwell himself come back to sneer in a new fashion.
How came he to be so evidently poor while old Harding was rolling in wealth? Mr. Hayes, sitting over the fire, wondered at this failure of Kate's hopes. People had called it a fair exchange, her old name for the Hardings' abundance of newly-coined gold. But where was the gold? Plainly not in this young Harding's pockets. What did he do for a living? Why was he not in his uncle's office, a man of business with the world before him? There was no stamp of success about this listless, long-legged fellow, who had come, as hopeless as any Rothwell, to linger about that scene of slow decay. "He'll do no good," said Mr. Hayes to himself, stirring up a cheerful blaze.