But he had succeeded in partially removing the handkerchief, and so caught a glimpse of her wet eyes, in which a faint smile struggled out like sunshine through rain.  But they clouded again, although she didn’t cry, and her breath came and went with the action of a sob, and her hands still remained against her flushed face.

“I was only going to talk to you of Kitty” (sob)—­“but I suppose I’m weak” (sob)—­“and such a fool” (sob) “and I got to thinking of myself and my own sorrows when I ought to be thinking only of you and Kitty.”

“Never mind Kitty,” said Barker impulsively.  “Tell me about yourself—­your own sorrows.  I am a brute to have bothered you about her at such a moment; and now until you have told me what is paining you so I shall not let you speak of her.”  He was perfectly sincere.  What were Kitty’s possible and easy tears over the loss of her money to the unknown agony that could wrench a sob from a woman like this?  “Dear Mrs. Horncastle,” he went on as breathlessly, “think of me now not as Kitty’s husband, but as your true friend.  Yes, as your best and truest friend, and speak to me as you would speak to him.”

“You will be my friend?” she said suddenly and passionately, grasping his hand, “my best and truest friend? and if I tell you all,—­everything, you will not cast me from you and hate me?”

Barker felt the same thrill from her warm hand slowly possess his whole being as it had the evening before, but this time he was prepared and answered the grasp and her eyes together as he said breathlessly, “I will be—­I am your friend.”

She withdrew her hand and passed it over her eyes.  After a moment she caught his hand again, and, holding it tightly as if she feared he might fly from her, bit her lip, and then slowly, without looking at him, said, “I lied to you about myself and Kitty that night; I did not come with her.  I came alone and secretly to Boomville to see—­to see the man who is my husband.”

“Your husband!” said Barker in surprise.  He had believed, with the rest of the world, that there had been no communication between them for years.  Yet so intense was his interest in her that he did not notice that this revelation was leaving now no excuse for his wife’s presence at Boomville.

Mrs. Horncastle went on with dogged bitterness, “Yes, my husband.  I went to him to beg and bribe him to let me see my child.  Yes, my child,” she said frantically, tightening her hold upon his hand, “for I lied to you when I once told you I had none.  I had a child, and, more than that, a child who at his birth I did not dare to openly claim.”

She stopped breathlessly, stared at his face with her former intensity as if she would pluck the thought that followed from his brain.  But he only moved closer to her, passed his arm over her shoulders with a movement so natural and protecting that it had a certain dignity in it, and, looking down upon her bent head with eyes brimming with sympathy, whispered, “Poor, poor child!”