I tell it to you as her friend." He drew a little nearer and quite fraternally laid his hand upon her own.

"I know you won't betray me, though you may think it wrong for me to have told it; but I wanted you to know how good she was and true." For a moment Mrs.Horncastle was amazed and discomfited, although she saw, with the inscrutable instinct of her sex, no inconsistency between the Kitty of those days and the Kitty now shamefully hiding from her husband in the same hotel.

No doubt Kitty had some good reason for her chivalrous act.

But she could see the unmistakable effect of that act upon the more logically reasoning husband, and that it might lead him to be more merciful to the later wrong.

And there was a keener irony that his first movement of unconscious kindliness towards her was the outcome of his affection for his undeserving wife.
"You said just now she was more practical than you," she said dryly.
"Apart from this evidence of it, what other reasons have you for thinking so?
Do you refer to her independence or her dealings in the stock market ?" she added, with a laugh.
"No," said Barker seriously, "for I do not think her quite practical there; indeed, I'm afraid she is about as bad as I am.