"He shall have a stronger hold by leaving you. What is he to gain? If I could only know his price."
"Ask him, papa."
"I do not even know how I am to speak to him again."
Then again there was a pause. "Papa," she said after a while, "I have done it myself. Let me go. You will still have Everett. And it may be that after a time I shall come back to you. He will not kill me, and it may be that I shall not die."
"By God!" said Mr. Wharton, rising from his chair suddenly, "if there were money to be made by it, I believe that he would murder you without scruple." Thus it was that within eighteen months of her marriage the father spoke to his daughter of her husband.
"What am I to take with me?" she said to her husband a few days later.
"You had better ask your father."
"Why should I ask him, Ferdinand? How should he know?"
"And how should I?"
"I should have thought that you would interest yourself about it."