Studies in Wives

by Marie Belloc Lowndes

"Why should David go to London?" observed Mr. Rigby mildly. "He's a personable fellow; any tailor could fit David. If I were you, Kate, I'd let him be." But Kate, to her lasting sorrow, did not let David be.

Both her husband and even Matilda Wellow herself could have told Mrs. Rigby that it was in London that her brother had spent his honeymoon with his wife; but though she had been made vividly aware of the circumstance—for it was from there that the news of his hasty marriage had reached her—that fact would not have seemed to her any reason why David should not now do the right and proper thing by his second bride.

Thus it was owing to Mrs. Rigby that Matilda was at last roused to a sense of what was due to herself. Banfield, with some discomfiture, discovered that Miss Wellow would take it ill of him not to pay her the compliment of going to the London tailor for his wedding clothes—"and then," had observed his sister briskly, "you'll be able to bring Tiddy back something handsome in the way of jewellery; for that's a thing you owe not only to her, David, but also to yourself."

II

David Banfield, just arrived in London, stood in an hotel bedroom overlooking the trees in Lincoln's Inn Fields.

Staring out at the leafy screen, which seemed to him so lacking in country freshness, there came to his mind poignant memories of a very different room and a very different outlook not half a mile away from where he stood, for he and Rosaleen had spent the first days of their married life in one of those vast hotels which, overlooking the Embankment and the river, are filled with light and air, as well as instinct with a certain material luxury which had pleased his young wife's taste more than his own.

With a quick movement he pushed up the old-fashioned guillotine window as far as it would go, and leaned out dangerously far; then he drew back sharply, feeling, as he now often felt when he was alone, that he was living through an unreal, a nightmare stage of his life, one which was bound to come sooner or later to an abrupt end, but which now must be lived through....

With unseeing eyes and unthinking mind he walked across to the shadowed corner where had been placed his portmanteau. Slowly, indifferently, he turned the key in the lock and raised the lid,—then quickened into alert, painful attention.

Lying on the top of its neatly folded contents was an envelope so placed that it could not but attract his attention, and on it was written—in the sprawling, unformed handwriting which was, perhaps, the only marked betrayal of Mary Scanlan's early lack of education—the one word "Important."

At once there leapt into Banfield's mind the certain knowledge of what the envelope contained. If he opened it, there most surely would he find his wife Rosaleen's address. It was this, then, that the Irishwoman had in her thoughts when she had asked him the unseemly question to which he had given so short and stern an answer.