“I should think not! But as you say, he can’t really do anything except talk. He’s permanently angry, though. He came into the bank yesterday and passed near me. I saw his face.”
John added no comment, but his tone expressed well enough what he felt.
“I know,” answered Katharine. “He always has that expression now,—one only used to see it now and then,—as though he meant to have something, if he had to kill somebody to get it. It’s the strangest thing! He, who has always preached to me about keeping the secret of other people’s confidence! It’s perfectly incomprehensible! It’s as though his whole nature had suddenly changed.”
“He’s wild to know how much he’s to have,” observed John, thoughtfully. “It attacked him when they expected uncle Robert to die. And now that he knows that you know, he means to wring it out of you. I hate him. I should like to wring his neck.”
“Jack!”
“Oh, well—of course he’s your father, and I’m very sorry for expressing myself—all the same—” he finished his sentence inwardly. “At all events, he’s got to treat you properly, or I shall interfere. This can’t go on, you know.”
“You, Jack dear? What could you do?”
“What could I do? Take you away from him, of course. I’m your husband. Don’t forget that, Katharine.”
“No, dear—I’m not likely to. But still—I don’t see—nothing’s changed, you know. The difficulties are just the same as they ever were.”
“Yes. But the reasons are different. I can’t allow you to suffer. You know that after all that trouble last winter my mother insisted on making over half the property to me. Of course things go on just as they did, and we share everything. But I’ve got it all the same—six thousand a year, if I choose to call it my own. The reason why we don’t tell everybody that we’re married is, first, because it would make such an incredible row in the family, and secondly, because, as my mother and I have so little between us, she would have to reduce ever so many things if we set up at housekeeping with her, until I can make something. As long as you’re happy at home, that’s all very well. We’re young enough to wait six months or a year, though we don’t like it, and I’m going in for earning the respect of the Beman Brethren—they’re really awfully nice to me, I must say. Anything more ignorant than I am you can’t imagine!”