Ralph looked bewildered, like a man blinded for a moment by a sudden flash of lightning. He could not at once realize that this woman, who had been his wife, who had washed and scrubbed in his little home in Hanley, was now one of those luminous women who, in clear skirts and pink stockings, wander singing beautiful songs, amid illimitable forests and unscalable mountains. For a moment he regretted he had married Miss Hender. 'But I don't think I shall ever act again.' 'How's that?' he said with an intonation of disappointment in his voice. 'I don't know,' said Kate. 'I'm not living with my husband now, and I haven't the courage to look out for an engagement myself.' Ralph stared at her vaguely. 'Look out for an engagement?' he repeated to himself; it seemed to him that he must be dreaming. 'Aren't you happy with him? Doesn't he treat you well?' said Ralph, dropping perforce from his dream back into reality, 'Oh yes, he has always been very good to me. I can't say how it was, but somehow after a time we didn't get on. I dare say it was my fault. But how do you get on with Miss Hender?' said Kate, partly from curiosity, half from a wish to change the conversation. 'Oh, pretty well,' said Ralph, with something that sounded, in spite of his wheezing, like a sigh. 'How does she manage the dressmaking? She was always a good workwoman, but she never had much taste, and I should fancy wouldn't be able to do much if left entirely to herself.' 'That's just what occurred. It's curious you should have guessed so correctly. The business has all gone to the dogs, and since mother's death we've turned the house into a lodging-house.' 'And is mother dead?' cried Kate, clasping her hands. 'What must she have thought of me.' Ralph did not answer, but after a long silence he said: 'It's a pity, ain't it, that we didn't pull it off better together?' Kate raised her head and looked at him quickly. Her look was full of gratitude. 'Yes,' she said, 'I behaved very badly towards you, but I believe I've been punished for it.' 'You told me that he married you and treated you very well.' 'Oh!' she said, bursting into tears, 'don't ask me, it's too long a story; I'll tell you another time, but not now.' It appeared to Kate that her heart was on fire and that she must die of grief. 'Was this life?' she asked herself. Oh, to be at rest and out of the way for ever! Ralph, too, seemed deeply affected; after a pause he said: 'I don't know how it was, or why, but now I come to think of it I remember that I used to be cross with you.' 'It was the asthma that made you cross, and well it might;' and she asked him if he still suffered from asthma, and he answered: 'At times, yes.' 'But the cigarettes,' she said, 'used to relieve you; do you still smoke them?' 'Yes, and sometimes they relieve me and sometimes they don't.' A long silence separated them, and breaking it suddenly he said: