"I suppose Rosy is well? I thought you meant sending the child in to see me to-day?" "Didn't she come?" A look of worry and anger crossed Banfield's dark, mobile face. "I can't think what prevented it, unless--well, there's been rather an upset at the Brew House, and perhaps Mary Scanlan didn't like to go out." "I heard there had been an upset," observed his sister drily, "for baker told cook. He said your housekeeper turned the younger maid, old Hornby's daughter, out of the house last night, and that the girl could be heard crying all down the street." Mrs. Rigby let her work fall unheeded on the floor; quite unconscious of her action she clasped her hands tightly together. "David! How long is this sort of thing to go on?" she asked, in a low, tense voice. "It's the talk of the whole town, and it can't be good for your child." "But what would you have me do?" He had hoped that to-day--his sister's silver wedding day--his domestic trials would be forgotten, or, at any rate, not mentioned. "I can't dismiss Mary Scanlan now--she must stay on till Rosy goes to school. That won't be for very long, for, as you know, I promised"--he averted his face as he spoke--"to send the child to a convent school as soon as she was twelve years old." The idea that her brother, the wealthy, highly-thought-of brewer of Market Dalling, should confess himself worsted by the old and ill-tempered Irishwoman, who, together with little Rosy, had been his wife's--his unfaithful wife's--only legacy to him, was horrible to his sister. Even now, when bitter, disconnected thoughts crowded one on another, Mrs. Rigby, half-unconsciously, evoked in her mind the strong personality of the one human being who ever really "stood up" to her. She had had the notion, so curiously common in England, that your Irishwoman is invariably slatternly, untruthful, and good-natured; but in Mary Scanlan she had found a human being as scrupulously neat, truthful, and high-minded as herself, while at the same time far more ill-tempered, and equally determined to have her own way. While Mrs. Rigby was allowing a flood of very bitter thoughts to surge up round her, David Banfield was watching her face, and awaiting her next words with some anxiety. But when Kate Rigby at last spoke, she seemed to have forgotten the immediate question under discussion. "I suppose," she said slowly, "that you have never thought, Dave, that there might be a simple way out of your difficulties?" "You mean that I might marry again? Well, Kate, yes--I have thought of it. I suppose there's no man, situated as I have been these last four years, but thinks of a second marriage as a way out; but--but, apart from other considerations, I don't feel as if I could bring myself to do it." "And why not, pray?" asked Mrs. Rigby in a low voice.