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, why 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.

The serious embarrassments that surrounded him were thickening fast. His natural frank nature urged him to undeceive Herbert. If he followed his inclinations, in the near neighborhood of the hotel, who could say what disasters might not ensue, in his brother’s present frame of mind? If he made the disclosure on their return to the house, he would be only running the same risk of consequences, after an interval of delay; and, if he remained silent, the march of events might, at any moment, lead to the discovery of what he had concealed. Add to this, that his confidence in Catherine had been rudely shaken. Having allowed herself to be entrapped into the deception proposed by her mother, and having thus far persevered in that deception, were the chances in favor of her revealing her true position—especially if she was disposed to encourage Bennydeck’s suit? Randal’s loyalty to Catherine hesitated to decide that serious question against the woman ............