Montgomery pushed his glasses higher on his nose, and after a long silence he said: 'I've often thought that had you met me before you knew Dick, things might have been different. We should have got on better, although you might never have loved me so well.' Kate raised her eyes, and she said: 'No one will ever know how I have loved, how I still love that man. Oftentimes I think that had I loved him less I should have been a better wife. I think he loved me, but it was not the love I dreamed of. Like you, I was always sentimental, and Dick never cared for that sort of thing.' 'I think I should have understood you better,' said Montgomery; and the conversation came to a pause. A vision of the life of devotion spent at the feet of an ideal lover, that life of sacrifice and tenderness which had been her dream, and which she had so utterly failed to attain, again rose up to tantalize her like a glittering mirage: and she could not help wondering whether she would have realized this beautiful, this wonderful might-have-been if she had chosen this other man. 'But I suppose you'll make it up with Dick,' said Montgomery somewhat harshly. Kate awoke from her reverie with a start, and answered sorrowfully that she did not know, that she was afraid Dick would never forgive her again. 'I don't remember if I told you that I'm going to see him in Manchester; he promised to go up there to make some arrangements about my piece.' 'No, you didn't tell me.' 'Well, I'll speak to him. I'll tell him I've seen you. I fancy I shall be able to make it all right,' he added, with a feeble smile. 'Oh! how good you are--how good you are,' cried Kate, clasping her hands. 'If he will only forgive me once again, I'll promise, I'll swear to him never to-to--' Here Kate stopped abashed, and burying her face in her hands, she wept bitterly. The tenderness, the melancholy serenity of their interview, had somehow suddenly come to an end. Each was too much occupied with his or her thoughts to talk much, and the effort to find phrases grew more and more irritating. Both were very sad, and although they sighed when the clock struck the hour of farewell, they felt that to pass from one pain to another was in itself an assuagement. Kate accompanied Montgomery to the station. He seemed to her to be out of temper; she to him to be further away than ever. The explanation that had taken place between them had, if not broken, at least altered the old bonds of sympathy, without creating new ones; and they were discontented, even like children who remember for the first time that to-day is not yesterday.