第97章 Chapter XLI. Make the Best of It.(1)

For a moment the two men looked at each other without speaking.

Herbert's wondering eyes accurately reflected his brother's astonishment.

"What are you doing here?" he asked. Suspicion overclouded his face as he put the question. "You have been to the hotel?" he burst out; "you have seen Catherine?"

Randal could deny that he had seen Catherine, with perfect truth--and did deny it in the plainest terms. Herbert was satisfied. "In all my remembrance of you," he said, you have never told me a lie. We have both seen the same newspaper, of course--and you have been the first to clear the thing up. That's it, isn't it?"

"I wonder who this other Mrs. Norman is; did you find out?"

"No."

"She's not Catherine, at any rate; I, for one, shall go home with a lighter heart." He took his brother's arm, to return to the other platform. "Do you know, Randal, I was almost afraid that Catherine was the woman. The devil take the thing, and the people who write in it!"

He snatched a newspaper out of his pocket as he spoke--tore it in half--and threw it away. "Malcolm meant well, poor fellow," he said, referring to the old servant, "but he made a miserable man of me for all that."

Not satisfied with gossip in private, the greedy public appetite devours gossip in print, and wants more of it than any one editor can supply. Randal picked up the torn newspaper. It was not the newspaper which he had bought at the station. Herbert had been reading a rival journal, devoted to the interests of Society--in which the report of Mrs. Norman's marriage was repeated, with this difference, that it boldly alluded to Captain Bennydeck by name. "Did Malcolm give you this?" Randal asked.

"Yes; he and the servant next door subscribe to take it in; and Malcolm thought it might amuse me. It drove me out of the house and into the railway. If it had driven me out of mind, I shouldn't have been surprised."

"Gently, Herbert! Supposing the report had been true--?"

"After what you have told me, wh y should I suppose anything of the sort?"

"Don't be angry; and do pray remember that the Divorce allows you and Catherine to marry again, if you like."

Herbert became more unreasonable than ever. "If Catherine does think of marrying again," he said, "the man will have to reckon first with me. But that is not the point. You seem to have forgotten that the woman at Buck's Hotel is described as a Widow.

The bare doubt that my divorced wife might be the woman was bad enough--but what I wanted to find out was how she had passed off her false pretense on our child. _That_ was what maddened me! No more of it now. Have you seen Catherine lately?"

"Not lately."

"I suppose she is as handsome as ever. When will you ask her to let me see Kitty?"

"Leave that to me," was the one reply which Randal could venture to make at the moment.