They both moved more closely to one another and she, so chary of caress, put her arms round his neck.
"I'm quite sure," she spoke with a catch in her voice, "quite, quite sure that you will never regret it! After all, life does get smoothed out, doesn't it? I'll tell you something about myself that I've never told anybody. Before Matthew came along, there was someone else I loved—loved, maybe, just as dearly as you loved Rosaleen."
"I know," said her brother, wincing at the sound of his late wife's name, "you mean Nat Bower?"
"Why, how did you ever guess that?" she asked, surprised.
"Oh! he used to take me walks when I was a kid, and he always talked about you."
Had Mrs. Rigby left the matter there, she would have been a wiser woman, but something prompted her to draw a moral.
"And don't you think I'm glad now?" she cried. "Think of what that poor fellow has become, and what Matthew is now!"
But this was too much for David Banfield.
"I don't think that's fair!" he exclaimed. "What you ought to say is—'Think of what that poor fellow might have become if he had married me!' I don't believe any man could have helped going straight with you, Kate. If I'd been more like you——"
Then, to the young man's relief, his brother-in-law, Matthew Rigby, came into the room, with a smile on his thin lips, a joke on his tongue.