ain!"

Catherine suddenly looked up.

"I knew it," Mrs. Presty continued, with her sternest emphasis; "I see
what you have done, in your face. You have refused Bennydeck."

"God forgive me, I have been wicked enough to accept him!"

Hearing this, some mothers might have made apologies; and other mothers
might have asked what that penitential reply could possibly mean. Mrs.
Presty was no matron of the ordinary type. She welcomed the good news,
without taking the smallest notice of the expression of self-reproach
which had accompanied it.

"My dear child, accept the congratulations of your fond old mother. I
have never been one of the kissing sort (I mean of course where women
are concerned); but this is an occasion which justifies something quite
out of the common way. Come and kiss me."

Catherine took no notice of that outburst of maternal love.

"I have forgotten everything that I ought to have remembered," she said.
"In my vanity, in my weakness, in my selfish enjoyment of the passing
moment, I have been too supremely happy even to think of the trials of
my past life, and of the false position in which they have placed me
toward a man, whom I ought to be ashamed to deceive. I have only been
recalled to a sense of duty, I might almost say to a sense of decency,
by my poor little child. If Kitty had not reminded me of her father--"

Mrs. Presty dropped into a chair: she was really frightened. Her fat
cheeks trembled like a jelly on a dish that is suddenly moved.

"Has that man been here?" she asked.

"What man?"

"The man who may break off your marriage if he meets with the Captain.
Has Herbert Linley been here?"

"Certainly not. The one person associated with my troubles whom I have
seen to-day is Sydney Westerfield."

Mrs. Presty bounced out of her chair. "You--have seen--Sydney
Westerfield?" she repeated with emphatic pauses which expressed
amazement tempered by unbelief.

"Yes; I have seen her."

"Where?"

"In the garden."

"And spoken to her?"

"Yes."

Mrs. Presty raised her eyes to the ceiling. Whether she expected our old
friend "the recording angel" to take down the questions and answers that
had just passed, or whether she was only waiting to see the hotel that
held her daughter collapse under a sense of moral responsibility, it is
not possible to decide. After an awful pause, the old lady remembered
that she had something more to say--and said it.

"I make no remark, Catherine; I do