"You
said--to marry him?"
Seeing that she had put out her hand, as if begging for the truth, he
added: "How can your brother marry her--she's married!"
"Oh!"
"I'd no idea you didn't know that much."
"We thought there was a divorce."
The expression of which mention has been made--that peculiar white-hot
sardonically jolly look--visited Courtier's face at once. "Hoist with
their own petard! The usual thing. Let a pretty woman live alone--the
tongues of men will do the rest."
"It was not so bad as that," said Barbara dryly; "they said she had
divorced her husband."
Caught out thus characteristically riding past the hounds Courtier bit
his lips.
"You had better hear the story now. Her father was a country parson, and
a friend of my father's; so that I've known her from a child. Stephen
Lees Noel was his curate. It was a 'snap' marriage--she was only twenty,
and had met hardly any men. Her father was ill and wanted to see her
settled before he died. Well, she found out almost directly, like a good
many other people, that she'd made an utter mistake."
Barbara came a little closer.
"What was the man like?"
"Not bad in his way, but one of those narrow, conscientious pig-headed
fellows who make the most trying kind of husband--bone egoistic. A
parson of that type has no chance at all. Every mortal thing he has to
do or say helps him to develop his worst points.
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