Studies in Wives

by Marie Belloc Lowndes

"And why not, pray?" asked Mrs. Rigby in a low voice.

"Well, it's difficult to explain the way I look at it. Of course, no one can answer for another, and yet, Kate, if anything happened to Matt, I don't see you marrying again——?"

David Banfield was aware that he had not chosen a very happy simile with which to point his meaning, and perhaps, in his heart of hearts, he hoped that what he had said would put an end to a painful discussion. But any such hope was destined to be grievously disappointed, for his sister, with suddenly heightened colour, turned on him very sharply.

"Don't talk nonsense!" she exclaimed. "I'm an old woman, and you're a young man!" and she set back her vigorous, powerful shoulders.

"You know very well that if Matthew had dared to treat me as you were treated by Rosal——" something in her brother's face caused his wife's name to die away on her lips—"I should have felt myself free to do exactly what suited me best! Surely, when you go out among your grand county friends, you must meet nice young ladies who would be only too pleased to become Mrs. David Banfield, and to step into such a home as the Brew House?"

Mrs. Rigby looked eagerly, furtively, at her brother.

The way in which he had been welcomed, to a certain extent absorbed, in the rather dull county society round Market Dalling, had been, to his sister, a source of mingled pride and jealousy, the more so that it had begun in the days of his pretty wife, whose modest professional fame had preceded her, and made her a welcome addition to county gatherings and dinner-parties. Then had come the great break of the war, and in South Africa Banfield had been naturally thrown with the landowners of his own part of the world.

So it was that during the first few months which had followed on his return home, Mrs. Rigby had fully expected her brother to make another, maybe as disastrous a matrimonial experiment as before, and in a class which was as little his own as that of his Irish wife had been.

But time had gone on, and David Banfield had shown no disposition to make a second marriage, either in the county set, or in the little town world of Market Dalling, where the Rigbys themselves lived and had their important being.

"Kate—you don't understand," he said at last, and, even as he uttered the words, they seemed to him painfully inadequate. "In fact, you never did understand"—there came a sudden touch of passion into his voice, and he got up and walked up and down the room—"how I felt—how for the matter of that I still feel—about Rosaleen. But for the war—but for the getting clear away—I don't know what I should have done! Once, when I was out there in a little out-of-the-way station, I saw an old bill with her name on it, put up, of course, before I met her, when she was touring in South Africa. Well, I can tell you one thing—if we had been back in the days when a soldier could get killed so much more easily than he can now, you would never have seen me again. For days and days I couldn't get her out of my mind—she's never out of my mind now——"