“What new shame is this?”
“Nothing NEW,” he replied. “Only five years ago I was livin' over on the Bar at Heavy Tree Hill under the name of Steptoe, and folks here might recognize me. I was here when your particular friend, Jim Stacy, who only knew me as Steptoe, and doesn't know me as Horncastle, your HUSBAND,—for all he's bound up my property for you,—made his big strike with his two partners. I was in his cabin that very night, and drank his whiskey. Oh, I'm all right there! I left everything all right behind me—only it's just as well he doesn't know I'm Horncastle. And as the boy happened to be there with me”—He stopped, and looked at her significantly.
The expression of her face changed. Eagerness, anxiety, and even fear came into it in turn, but always mingling with some scorn that dominated her. “The boy!” she said in a voice that had changed too; “well, what about him? You promised to tell me all,—all!”
“Where's the money?” he said. “Husband and wife are ONE, I know,” he went on with a coarse laugh, “but I don't trust MYSELF in these matters.”
She took from a traveling-reticule that lay beside her a roll of notes and a chamois leather bag of coin, and laid them on the table before him. He examined both carefully.
“All right,” he said. “I see you've got the checks made out 'to bearer.' Your head's level, Conny. Pity you and me can't agree.”
“I went to the bank across the way as soon as I arrived,” she said, with contemptuous directness. “I told them I was going over to Hymettus and might want money.”
He dropped into a chair before her with his broad heavy hands upon his knees, and looked at her with an equal, though baser, contempt: for his was mingled with a certain pride of mastery and possession.
“And, of course, you'll go to Hymettus and cut a splurge as you always do. The beautiful Mrs. Horncastle! The helpless victim of a wretched, dissipated, disgraced, gambling husband. So dreadfully sad, you know, and so interesting! Could get a divorce from the brute if she wanted, but won't, on account of her religious scruples. And so while the brute is gambling, swindling, disgracing himself, and dodging a shot here and a lynch committee there, two or three hundred miles away, you're splurging round in first-class hotels and watering-places, doing the injured and abused, and run after by a lot of men who are ready to take my place, and, maybe, some of my reputation along with it.”
“Stop!” she said suddenly, in a voice that made the glass chandelier ring. He had risen too, with a quick, uneasy glance towards the door. But her outbreak passed as suddenly, and sinking back into her chair, she said, with her previous scornful resignation, “Never mind. Go on. You KNOW you're lying!”