Page:Herbert Jenkins - Bindle.djvu/65

 The result had been that Mrs. Bindle's sister, Martha, had caught Mr. Hearty at the rebound, and had since regretted it as much as she ever regretted anything.

"When you're my size," she would say, "you don' trouble much about anything. It's the lean ones as worries. Look at Lizzie." Lizzie was Mrs. Bindle

Mrs. Bindle herself had been very different as a girl. Theatres and music-halls were not then "places of sin"; and she was not altogether above suspicion of being a flirt. When it dawned upon her that she had made a mistake in marrying Bindle and letting her sister Martha secure the matrimonial prize, a great bitterness had taken possession of her.

As Mr. Hearty slowly climbed the ladder towards success, Mrs. Bindle's thoughts went with him. He became her great interest in life. No wife or mother ever watched the progress of husband or son with keener interest or greater admiration than Mrs. Bindle watched that of her brother-in-law.

Gradually she began to make him her "pattern to live and to die." She joined the Alton Road Chape], gave up all "carnal" amusements, and began a careful and elaborate preparation for the next world.

Bindle, as the unconscious cause of her humiliation—the supreme humiliation of a woman's life, marrying the wrong man—became