Helmsley lifted up his head with sudden and animated interest.
"Were you, Mary?"
"Oh, yes!" And the smile deepened round her expressive mouth and played softly in her eyes—"Yes, David, really! I was engaged to a very good-looking young man in the electrical engineering business. And I was very fond of him. But when my father lost every penny, my good-looking young man went too. He said he couldn't possibly marry a girl with nothing but the clothes on her back. I cried very much at the time, and thought my heart was broken. But—it wasn't!"
"I should hope it wouldn't break for such a selfish rascal!" said Reay, warmly.
"Do you think he was more selfish than most?" queried Mary, thoughtfully—"There's a good many who would do as he did."
A silence followed. She sat down and resumed her work.
"Have you finished your story?" she asked Reay—"It has interested me so much that I'm hoping there's some more to tell."
As she spoke to him he started as if from a dream. He had been watching her so earnestly that he had almost forgotten what he had previously been talking about. He found himself studying the beautiful outline of her figure, and wondering why he had never before seen such gracious curves of neck and shoulder, waist and bosom as gave symmetrical perfection of shape to this simple woman born of the "common" people.
"More to tell?" he echoed, hastily,—"Well, there's a little—but not much. My love affair at Loch Lomond did one thing for me,—it made me work hard. I had a sort of desperate idea that I might wrest a fortune out of journalism by dint of sheer grinding at it—but I soon found out my mistake there. I toiled away so steadily and got such a firm hold of all the affairs of the newspaper office where I was employed, that one fine morning I was dismissed. My proprietor, genial and kindly as ever, said he found 'no fault'—but that he wanted 'a change.' I quite understood that. The fact is I knew too much—that's all. I had saved a bit, and so, with a few good letters of introduction, went on from Glasgow to London. There, in that great black ant-hill full of crawling sooty human life, I knocked about for a time from one newspaper office to another, doing any sort of work that turned up, just to keep body and soul together,—and at last I got a fairly good berth in the London branch of a big press syndicate. It was composed of three or four proprietors, ever so many editors, and an army of shareholders representing almost every class in Great Britain. Ah, those shareholders! There's the whole mischief of the press nowadays!"
"I suppose it's money again!" said Helmsley.