He took leave of Mrs. Presty with the formality due to a stranger—­he merely bowed.  That incorrigible old woman treated him with affectionate familiarity in return.

“Good-by, dear Randal.  One moment before you go!  Will it be of any use if we invite you to the marriage?”

Arrived at the station, Randal found that he must wait for the train.  While he was walking up and down the platform with a mind doubly distressed by anxiety about his brother and anxiety about Sydney, the train from London came in.  He stood, looking absently at the passengers leaving the carriage on the opposite side of the platform.  Suddenly, a voice that he knew was audible, asking the way to Buck’s Hotel.  He crossed the line in an instant, and found himself face to face with Herbert.

Chapter XLI.

Make the Best of It.

For a moment the two men looked at each other without speaking.  Herbert’s wondering eyes accurately reflected his brother’s astonishment.

“What are you doing here?” he asked.  Suspicion overclouded his face as he put the question.  “You have been to the hotel?” he burst out; “you have seen Catherine?”

Randal could deny that he had seen Catherine, with perfect truth—­and did deny it in the plainest terms.  Herbert was satisfied.  “In all my remembrance of you,” he said, “you have never told me a lie.  We have both seen the same newspaper, of course—­and you have been the first to clear the thing up.  That’s it, isn’t it?”

“I wonder who this other Mrs. Norman is; did you find out?”

“No.”

“She’s not Catherine, at any rate; I, for one, shall go home with a lighter heart.”  He took his brother’s arm, to return to the other platform.  “Do you know, Randal, I was almost afraid that Catherine was the woman.  The devil take the thing, and the people who write in it!”

He snatched a newspaper out of his pocket as he spoke—­tore it in half—­and threw it away.  “Malcolm meant well, poor fellow,” he said, referring to the old servant, “but he made a miserable man of me for all that.”

Not satisfied with gossip in private, the greedy public appetite devours gossip in print, and wants more of it than any one editor can supply.  Randal picked up the torn newspaper.  It was not the newspaper which he had bought at the station.  Herbert had been reading a rival journal, devoted to the interests of Society—­in which the report of Mrs. Norman’s marriage was repeated, with this difference, that it boldly alluded to Captain Bennydeck by name.  “Did Malcolm give you this?” Randal asked.

“Yes; he and the servant next door subscribe to take it in; and Malcolm thought it might amuse me.  It drove me out of the house and into the railway.  If it had driven me out of mind, I shouldn’t have been surprised.”

“Gently, Herbert!  Supposing the report had been true—?”

“After what you have told me, why should I suppose anything of the sort?”