book-marker, sat down beside it, and with her hands in her lap and her eyes on the page began abstractedly to tear a small piece of paper into tiny fragments. When she had reduced it to the smallest shreds, she scraped the pieces out of her silk lap and again collected them in the pink hollow of her little hand, kneeling down on the scrupulously well-swept carpet to peck up with a bird-like action of her thumb and forefinger an escaped atom here and there. These and the contents of her hand she poured into the chilly cavity of a sepulchral-looking alabaster vase that stood on the etagere. Returning to her old seat, and making a nest for her clasped fingers in the lap of her dress, she remained in that attitude, her shoulders a little narrowed and bent forward, until her husband returned.
“I’ve lit the fire in the bedroom for you to change your clothes by,” she said, as he entered; then evading the caress which this wifely attention provoked, by bending still more primly over her book, she added, “Go at once. You’re making everything quite damp here.”
He returned in a few moments in his slippers and jacket, but evidently found the same difficulty in securing a conjugal and confidential contiguity to his wife. There was no apparent social centre or nucleus of comfort in the apartment; its fireplace, sealed by an iron ornament like a monumental tablet over dead ashes, had its functions superseded by an air-tight drum in the corner, warmed at second-hand from the dining-room below, and offered no attractive seclusion; the sofa against the wall was immovable and formally repellent. He was obliged to draw a chair beside the table, whose every curve seemed to facilitate his wife’s easy withdrawal from side-by-side familiarity.
“Demorest has been urging me very strongly to go to California, but, of course, I spoke of you,” he said, stealing his hand into his wife’s lap, and possessing himself of her fingers.
Mrs. Blandford slowly lifted her fingers enclosed in his clasping hand and placed them in shameless publicity on the volume before her. This implied desecration was too much for Blandford; he withdrew his hand.
“Does that man propose to go with you?” asked Mrs. Blandford, coldly.
“No; he’s preoccupied with other matters that he wanted me to talk to you about,” said her husband, hesitatingly. “He is—”
“Because”—continued Mrs. Blandford in the same measured tone, “if he does not add his own evil company to his advice, it is the best he has ever given yet. I think he might have taken another day than the Lord’s to talk about it, but we must not despise the means nor the hour whence the truth comes. Father wanted me to take some reasonable moment to prepare you to consider it seriously, and I thought of talking to you about it to-morrow. He thinks it would be a very judicious plan. Even Deacon Truesdail—”
“Having sold his invoice of damaged sugar kettles for mining purposes, is converted,” said Blandford, goaded into momentary testiness by his wife’s unexpected acquiescence and a sudden recollection of Demorest’s prophecy. “You have changed your opinion, Joan, since last fall, when you couldn’t bear to think of my leaving you,” he added reproachfully.
“I couldn’t bear to think of your joining the mob of lawless and sinful men who use that as an excuse for leaving their wives and families. As for my own feelings, Edward, I have never allowed them to stand between me and what I believed best for our home and your Christian welfare. Though I have no cause to admire the influence that I find this man, Demorest, still holds over you, I am willing to acquiesce, as you see, in what he advises for your good. You can hardly reproach ME, Edward, for worldly or selfish motives.”
Blandford felt keenly the bitter truth of his wife’s speech. For the moment he would gladly have exchanged it for a more illogical and selfish affection, but he reflected that he had married this religious girl for the security of an affection which he felt was not subject to the temptations of the world—or even its own weakness—as was too often the case with the giddy maidens whom he had known through Demorest’s companionship. It was, therefore, more with a sense of recalling this distinctive quality of his wife than any loyalty to Demorest that he suddenly resolved to confide to her the latter’s fatuous folly.
“I know it, dear,” he said, apologetically, “and we’ll talk it over to-morrow, and it may be possible to arrange it so that you shall go with me. But, speaking of Demorest, I think you don’t quite do HIM justice. He really respects YOUR feelings and your knowledge of right and wrong more than you imagine. I actually believe he came here to-night merely to get me to interest you in an extraordinary love affair of his. I mean, Joan,” he added hastily, seeing the same look of dull repression come over her face, “I mean, Joan—that is, you know, from all I can judge—it is something really serious this time. He intends to reform. And this is because he has become violently smitten with a young woman whom he has only seen half a dozen times, at long intervals, whom he first met in a railway train, and whose name and residence he don’t even know.”
There was an ominous silence—so hushed that the ticking of the allegorical clock came like a grim monitor. “Then,” said Mrs. Blandford, in a hard, dry voice that her alarmed husband scarcely recognized, “he proposed to insult your wife by taking her into his shameful confidence.”
“Good heavens! Joan, no—you don’t understand. At the worst, this is some virtuous but silly school-girl, who, though she may be intending only an innocent flirtation with him, has made this man actually and deeply in love with her. Yes; it is a fact, Joan. I know Dick Demorest, and if ever there was a man honestly in love, it is he.”
“Then you mean to say that this man—an utter stranger to me—a man whom I’ve never laid my eyes on—whom I wouldn’t know if I met in the street—expects me to advise him—to—to—” She stopped. Blandford could scarcely believe his senses. There were tears in her eyes—this woman who never cried; her voice trembled—she who had always controlled her emotions.
He took advantage of this odd but opportune melting. He placed his arm around her shoulders. She tried to escape it, but with a coy, shy movement, half hysterical, half girlish, unlike her usual stony, moral precision. “Yes, Joan,” he repeated, laughingly, “but whose fault is it? Not HIS, remember! And I firmly believe he thinks you can do him good.”
“But he has never seen me,” she continued, with a nervous little laugh, “and probably considers me some old Gorgon—like—like—Sister Jemima Skerret.”
Blandford smiled with the complacency of far-reaching masculine intuition. Ah! that shrewd fellow, Demorest, was right. Joan, dear Joan, was only a woman after all.
“Then he’ll be the more agreeably astonished,” he returned, gayly, “and I think YOU will, too, Joan. For Dick isn’t a bad-looking fellow; most women like him. It’s true,” he continued, much amused at the novelty of the perfectly natural toss and grimace with which Mrs. Blandford received this statement.
“I think he’s been pointed out to me somewhere,” she said, thoughtfully; “he’s a tall, dark, dissipated-looking man.”
“Nothing of the kind,” laughed her husband. “He’s middle-sized and as blond as your cousin Joe, only he’s got a long yellow moustache, and has a quick, abrupt way of talking. He isn’t at all fancy-looking; you’d take him for an energetic business man or a doctor, if you didn’t know him. So you see, Joan, this correct little wife of mine has been a little, just a little, prejudiced.”
He drew her again gently backwards and nearer his seat, but she caught his wrists in her slim hands, and rising from the chair at the same moment, dexterously slipped from his embrace with her back towards him. “I do not know why I should be unprejudiced by anything you’ve told me,” she said, sharply closing the book of sermons, and, with her back still to her husband, reinstating it formally in its place on the cabinet. “It’s probably one of his many scandalous pursuits of defenceless and
