“It’s well enough,” conceded Mrs. Prentice, amiably.  “And how have you been all these years?”

Mr. Barrett, with some haste, replied that his health and spirits had been excellent.

“You look well,” said Mrs. Prentice.  “Neither of you seem to have changed much,” she added, looking from him to her daughter.  “And I think you did quite well not to write.  I think it was much the best.”

Mr. Barrett sought for a question:  a natural, artless question, that would neutralize the hideous suggestion conveyed by this remark, but it eluded him.  He sat and gazed in growing fear at Mrs. Prentice.

“I—­I couldn’t write,” he said at last, in desperation; “my wife——­”

“Your what?” exclaimed Mrs. Prentice, loudly.

“Wife,” said Mr. Barrett, suddenly calm now that he had taken the plunge.  “She wouldn’t have liked it.”

Mrs. Prentice tried to control her voice.  I never heard you were married!” she gasped.  “Why isn’t she here?”

“We couldn’t agree,” said the veracious Mr. Barrett.  “She was very difficult; so I left the children with her and——­”

“Chil——­” said Mrs. Prentice, and paused, unable to complete the word.

“Five,” said Mr. Barrett, in tones of resignation.  “It was rather a wrench, parting with them, especially the baby.  He got his first tooth the day I left.”

The information fell on deaf ears.  Mrs. Prentice, for once in her life thoroughly at a loss, sat trying to collect her scattered faculties.  She had come out prepared for a hard job, but not an impossible one.  All things considered, she took her defeat with admirable composure.

“I have no doubt it is much the best thing for the children to remain with their mother,” she said, rising.

“Much the best,” agreed Mr. Barrett.  “Whatever she is like,” continued the old lady.  “Are you ready, Louisa?”

Mr. Barrett followed them to the door, and then, returning to the room, watched, with glad eyes, their progress up the street.

“Wonder whether she’ll keep it to herself?” he muttered.

His doubts were set at rest next day.  All Ramsbury knew by then of his matrimonial complications, and seemed anxious to talk about them; complications which tended to increase until Mr. Barrett wrote out a list of his children’s names and ages and learnt it off by heart.

Relieved of the attentions of the Prentice family, he walked the streets a free man; and it was counted to him for righteousness that he never said a hard word about his wife.  She had her faults, he said, but they were many thousand miles away, and he preferred to forget them.  And he added, with some truth, that he owed her a good deal.

For a few months he had no reason to alter his opinion.  Thanks to his presence of mind, the Prentice family had no terrors for him.  Heart-whole and fancy free, he led the easy life of a man of leisure, a condition of things suddenly upset by the arrival of Miss Grace Lindsay to take up a post at the elementary school.  Mr. Barrett succumbed almost at once, and, after a few encounters in the street and meetings at mutual friends’, went to unbosom him-self to Mr. Jernshaw.