Fate might have decreed that she should meet Mr. Robert Harding, a successful man of business in the city, twenty years older than herself, slightly bald, rather stout, keen in his narrow range, but with very little perception of anything which lay right or left of the road by which he was travelling to fortune. The beautiful Miss Rothwell would have thanked Fate and set to work to win him. But it is not only our good resolutions that are the sport of warring chances. Our unworthy schemes do not always ripen into fact. Kate did not meet Mr. Robert Harding, she met his brother Sidney, a tall, bright-eyed, red-lipped young fellow, with the world before him, and the pair fell in love as simply and freshly as if the croquet ground at Balaclava Lodge were the Garden of Eden, or a glade in Arcady. In a week they were engaged to be married, and were both honestly ready to swear that no other marriage had ever been possible for either. To her he appeared with the golden light of the future about his head; to him she came with all the charm and shadowy romance of long descent, and of a poverty far statelier than newly-won wealth. Friends reminded Sidney that with his liberal allowance from his brother, and his prospect of a partnership at twenty-five, he might have married a girl with money had he chosen. Friends also mentioned to Kate, with bated breath, that the Hardings' father, dead twenty years earlier, had been a pork-butcher. Sidney laughed, and Kate turned away in scorn. She was absolutely glad that she could make what the world considered a sacrifice for her darling. At Mitchelhurst her engagement, though not welcomed, was not strongly opposed. John Rothwell sneered as much as he dared, but he knew his sister's temper, and it was too like his own for him to care to trifle with it. So he stood aside, very wisely, for there was a touch of the lioness about Kate with this new love of hers, and he saw mischief in the eyes that were so sweet while she was thinking about Sidney. It was at that time that she spoke her word of half-scornful sympathy to Herbert Hayes. And in a year her married life, with all its tender and softening influences, was over. An accident had killed Sidney Harding before he was twenty-five, before his child was born, and Kate was left alone in comparatively straitened circumstances. For her child's sake she endured her sorrow, demanding almost fiercely of God that He would give her a son to grow up like his dead father, and when the boy was born she called him Reynold. Sidney was too sacred a name; there could be but one Sidney Harding for her, but she remembered that he had once said that he wished he had been called Reynold, after his father.