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Now that woman’s clothes were hanging on the line (and very common-looking clothes they were), so she could not have been a casual guest. Moreover, she was pacing the hard ground in front of the house, and staring at us with a truculent yet uneasy air. Curiosity was strong, and a sort of anger possessed me against the place and everybody connected with it.

When Cecil came out, looking very hot and confused for him, who is always so fresh and gay, I inquired, rather shortly perhaps, “Who is your visitor?”

“I have no visitor,” he answered me, as cool as you please. But there was a protest in his eye. I was determined not to spare him or any of the Harshaws.

“Your housekeeper, then?”

“I have no housekeeper.”

“Who is the lady stopping at your house?”

“I have no house.”

“Your cousin’s house, then?”

“If you refer to the person I was talking to–she is my cousin’s housekeeper, I suppose.”

Tom gave me a look, and I thought it time to let the subject drop. This was in Kitty’s presence, though apparently she neither saw nor heard. I walked on ahead of the wagon, so angry that I was almost sick. Instantly Harshaw joined me, with a much nicer, brighter look upon his face.

“Mrs. Daly,” he said, “I want to beg your pardon. I could not answer your question before Miss Comyn. The lady, as you were pleased to call her, is Mrs. Harshaw, my cousin –Micky’s wife, you understand.”

“Since when?”

“Day before yesterday, she tells me. They were married at Bliss.”

“Well, I should say it was ‘Bliss’ for Kitty Comyn that she is not Mrs. Harshaw–too,” I was about to add, but that would be going rather far. “And what did you want to bring that girl over here for?”

“Mrs. Daly, I have told you,–I thought she loved him.”

“And what of his love for her?”

“Good heavens! you don’t suppose Micky cares for that old thing he has married! That was what I was trying to save him from. He’d have had to be the deuce of a lot worse than he is to deserve that.”

Had it occurred to him, I put it to Cecil Harshaw, to ask himself what the saving of his precious cousin might have cost the girl who was to have been offered up to that end?

“You leave out one small feature of the case,” said Harshaw, with a sick and burning look that made me drop my eyes, old woman as I am. “I love her myself so well that, by Heaven! if she had wanted Micky or any other man, she should have had him, if that was what her heart was set upon. But I didn’t believe it was. I wanted her to know the truth, and, hang it! I couldn’t write it to her. I couldn’t peach on Micky; but I wanted to smash things. I wanted something to happen. Maybe I didn’t do the right thing, but I had to do something.”

I couldn’t tell him just what I thought of him at that moment, but I did say to him that he had some very simple ideas for an end-of-the-century young Englishman. At which he smiled sweetly, and said it was one of his simple ideas that Kitty need not be informed who or what her successor was, or how promptly she had been succeeded.

“But just now you said you wanted her to know the truth.”

“Not the whole truth. Great Scott! she knows enough. No need to rub it in.”

“She knows just enough about this to misunderstand, perhaps. In justice to yourself–she heard you beating about the bush–do you want her to misunderstand you?”

“Oh, hang me! I don’t expect her to understand me, or even tolerate me, yet. Mine is a waiting race, Mrs. Daly.”

“Very well; you can wait,” I said. “But news like this will not wait. She will be obliged to hear it; you don’t know how or where she may hear it. Better let her hear it first in as decent a way as possible.”