"It isn't that—I don't care for that. It's for Jane and David. I can only offer to buy your silence; nothing more," she said with hurried words. "I own shares in the railroad; they're worth twenty thousand dollars. Will you take them?"
"My dear," he said, leaning quite close to her, "I am not seeking to blackmail you as you seem to imagine. I have only tried to tell you that I love you."
"Oh," she exclaimed, with a shudder of disgust. His face was quite close to hers; she could feel his warm breath on her cheek and she drew away quickly. His hand hovered close to hers as it lay in her lap.
There was an eye-witness to this single picture in the brief scene. Jane had started downstairs. From the upper steps she could look into the drawing-room below. She could not help seeing Bansemer's fervent attitude; she heard nothing that he said. The girl paused in surprise; a feeling as of dread—she could not explain—crept over her. A chill struck into her heart.
It was as if she had awakened from a sweet sleep to look out upon a bleak, horrid morning.
Involuntarily she shrank back, quite beyond the actual vision but not free from it. She stood straight and tense and silent at the top of the stairs, her hand clasping the rail. She could hear her heart throbs plainly. There was no mistaking the picture as it had burst upon her unsuspecting eyes. With a quavering smile she tried to throw it from her. But cold and damning there arose to support her apprehensions the horrid stories of Mrs. Blanckton and her affair with Rellick. With her own eyes she had seen Rellick talking to Mrs. Blanckton just as Bansemer was talking to her mother in the dim doom below. The Blanckton scandal, as everyone knew, was one of the most infamous the city had known. Jane, with other girls, had been shocked by the boldness of the intrigue; she had loathed Rellick for his unprincipled love-making; she had despised and denounced Mrs. Blanckton. Here now was her own mother listening just as Mrs. Blanckton had listened; here was James Bansemer talking just as Rellick had talked. A great fear, a dark uncertainty, welled up in her heart.
It was not until the butler admitted other callers that she found the courage to turn her eyes toward the drawing-room. She was never to forget the dread that grew with the thought of what she might have seen had she remained a voluntary witness during the minutes which followed her first look below. That single vision effected a sharp, complete change in Jane Cable's life. From that moment she never saw the world as it had appeared to her before.
Although she succeeded in, hiding the fact, it was difficult to approach and greet James Bansemer with the naturalness of the unsuspecting. His manner was beyond reproach, and yet, for the first time, she saw the real light in his black eyes. She talked to him as if nothing had happened to make her distrustful, but no self-control in the world could have checked the growth of that remorseless thing called suspicion. For her own sake, for her mother's, for Graydon's, she tried to put it down. Instead, it grew greater and stronger as she looked into his eyes, for in them she saw the light that heretofore had escaped her notice.
And this was the father of the man whom she was to marry, the one whom she loved with all her heart and soul! This, the man who would degrade her own mother! Her mother—she looked at her with a new question in her eyes. She looked for the thing which had marked Mrs. Blanckton. It was not there, and she rejoiced in that discovery. Her mother did not possess the bold, daring, defiant air of the other woman. Hers was tender, sweet, even subdued; the girl clutched hopefully at this sign and began to build upon it.
Half a dozen people came and went. James Bansemer was the last to leave. He met the girl's tense, inquiring look from time to time, but he could not have felt its meaning. There was nothing in her voice which might have warned him, although it sounded strained and without warmth on her own ears. In spite of herself she wondered how he would act in saying good-bye to her mother. Although she tried with all the might of her will to look away, she could not take her eyes from the pair as Bansemer arose to depart.