She interrupted him here to ask pointedly, "Has your brother told you anything about the point at issue?"
He was forced to answer that he had not.
"Then you are not competent to arbitrate," she said, quietly, and the subject was not easy to re-open after that. He went away baffled in his endeavors, berating himself for a blundering fool, but strengthened in the belief that the blame was not all on one side. The girl was ice.
As he thought it over that night, one thing came back to him again and again. She had said, "This is a thing that must be settled without a go-between, and some day it will be." What did she mean by that? How would it be settled? She had looked uncompromising as she said it. What did she intend to do—get a divorce? Of course she could get it—on the palpable ground of desertion. He could see a difference in her attitude toward Victor as the months went by. At first there had been a reserve, a suspension of judgment, then apathy, and of late growing resentment. He had correctly interpreted her states of mind, though he did not appreciate the cause. As the months went by and Victor did not come, did not write, did not once even ask about his child, her heart hardened against him. This ignoring of Philip seemed worse to her almost than his treatment of herself. How could he stay away from his child? How could he be false to a helpless little thing like this that he had brought into the world? How could he— Then she would snatch little Philip up in a passion of tenderness and cry in her heart, "I will be father and mother both to you, my baby, my poor little forsaken baby!"
As the months went by the chances seemed slighter that this thing would ever be "patched up," as Richard De Jarnette had said. She asked Judge Kirtley one day if a man had any claim upon a child he had deserted. Yes, he told her without comment, unless the mother was divorced from him. She closed her lips suddenly and said no more. She had read in the paper one day about a man's taking his child away from its mother, who had left him. The woman was a Catholic and could not have recourse to divorce to protect herself. Margaret thought a good deal about this incident. She had always been opposed to divorce.
Richard De Jarnette came to her again one day. He had had another letter from Victor,—a very touching one it had seemed to him as he read it. With Margaret's cold eyes upon him it seemed less so.
Victor was anxious for a reconciliation—he told her—and she bowed.
He was tired of his expatriation and longed for home—She smiled.
—and for a sight of his child.
"He is long remembering his child," she said.