He shut the door behind him and looked, with a world of interrogation and anxiety in his eyes, at his wife.
"You needn't smile," she said sharply; "this is no smiling matter!"
His eyes fell; instinctively he turned to the other, the weaker vessel. But the reproof which Mrs. Rigby had just addressed to her husband penetrated Miss Wellow's brain.
"I'm afraid I do look rather silly!" she said nervously, "wearing this dress, I mean. But, you see, knowing that now I shall never wear it, I thought I would put it on to-night."
The odd collocation of her words passed unnoticed; indeed, Mr. Rigby, even had he wished to answer her, was not given time to do so, for his wife had turned on him and was avenging in his person the heaped-up wrongs of her sex.
"It's all your fault, Matt! You were always against David going to London from the first, and you ought to have prevented his doing so! But no—you stood aside and did nothing! I suppose you guessed he might meet that—that——" her lips snapped together she would not soil them by uttering the word which to her mind alone described Rosaleen.
As her husband did not answer, suspicion grew into certainty.
"Did you know that she was there? Did you think he would see her?" she demanded.
Mr. Rigby looked mildly at his Kate. "I didn't know anything, but I did just think it possible," he said.
But his triumph, if triumph it was, was short-lived.