her,
"Poor Kathleen Steele!" for her spotless name stood sharply off from his
negligence and dissipation. They called her "Poor Kathleen Steele!" in
sympathy, though they knew that she had not resisted marriage with the
well-to-do Charley Steele, while loving a poor captain in the Royal
Fusileers. She preserved social sympathy by a perfect outward decorum,
though the man of the scarlet coat remained in the town and haunted the
places where she appeared, and though the eyes of the censorious world
were watching expectantly. No voice was raised against her. Her cold
beauty held the admiration of all women, for she was not eager for men's
company, and she kept her poise even with the man in scarlet near her,
glacially complacent, beautifully still, disconcertingly emotionless.
They did not know that the poise with her was to an extent as much a
pose as Charley's manner was to him.

"I hate you and despise you for a cold-blooded, selfish coward!" So that
was the way Kathleen felt! Charley's tongue touched his lips quickly,
for they were arid, and he slowly said:

"I assure you I have not tried to influence Billy. I have no remembrance
of his imitating me in anything. Won't you sit down? It is very
fatiguing, this heat."

Charley was entirely himself again. His words concerning Billy Wantage
might have been either an impeachment of Billy's character and, by
deduction, praise of his own, or it may have been the insufferable
egoism of the fop, well used to imitators. The veil between the two,
which for one sacred moment had seemed about to lift, was fallen now,
leaded and weighted at the bottom.

"I suppose you would say the same about John Brown! It is disconcerting
at least to think that we used to sit and listen to Mr. Brown as he
waved his arms gracefully in his surplice and preached sentimental
sermons. I suppose you will say, what we have heard you say before,
that you only asked questions. Was that how you ruined the Rev. John
Brown--and Billy?"

Charley was very thirsty, and because of that perhaps, his voice had an
unusually dry tone as he replied: "I asked questions of John Brown; I
answer them to Billy. It is I that am ruined!"

There was that in his voice she did not understand, for though long used
to his paradoxical phrases and his everlasting pose--as it seemed to her
and all the world--there now rang through his words a note she had never
heard before. For a fleeting instant she was inclined to catch at