ard him for confessing himself to be a bachelor, by a kiss. He
innocently checked that impulse by putting a question. "Had you any
particular reason," he asked, "for guessing that I was a single man?"

Mrs. Presty modestly acknowledged that she had only her own experience
to help her. "You wouldn't be quite so fond of other people's children,"
she said, "if you were a married man. Ah, your time will come yet--I
mean your wife will come."

He answered this sadly. "My time has gone by. I have never had the
opportunities that have been granted to some favored men." He thought of
the favored man who had married Mrs. Norman. Was her husband worthy
of his happiness? "Is Mr. Norman with you at this place?" the Captain
asked.

Serious issues depended on the manner in which this question was
answered. For one moment, and for one moment only, Mrs. Presty
hesitated. Then (in her daughter's interest, of course) she put
Catherine in the position of a widow, in the least blamable of all
possible ways, by honestly owning the truth.

"There is no Mr. Norman," she said.

"Your daughter is a widow!" cried the Captain, perfectly unable to
control his delight at that discovery.

"What else should she be?" Mrs. Presty replied, facetiously.

What else, indeed! If "no Mr. Norman" meant (as it must surely mean)
that Mr. Norman was dead, and if the beautiful mother of Kitty was an
honest woman, her social position was beyond a doubt. Captain Bennydeck
felt a little ashamed of his own impetuosity. Before he had made up
his mind what to say next, the unlucky waiter (doomed to be a cause of
disturbance on that day) appeared again.

"I beg your pardon, ma'am," he said; "the lady and gentleman who have
taken these rooms have just arrived."

Mrs. Presty got up in a hurry, and cordially shook hands with the
Captain. Looking round, she took up the railway guide and her knitting
left on the table. Was there anything else left about? There was nothing
to be seen. Mrs. Presty crossed the passage to her daughter's bedroom,
to hurry the packing. Captain Bennydeck went downstairs, on his way back
to the yacht.

In the hall of the hotel he passed the lady and gentleman--and, of
course, noticed the lady. She was little and dark and would have been
pretty, if she had not looked ill and out of spirits. What would he have
said, what would he have done, if he had known that those two strangers
were Randal Linley's brother and Roderick Westerfield's dau