“You’ve got a price. Men of your type always have. I told Nellie I would see you to-day. I’ll be plain with you. She’s tired of you, of this miserable attachment. You are impossible. That’s settled. We won’t go into that. Now I’m here, man to man, to find out how much you will take and agree to a separation.”
Harvey stiffened. He thought for a moment that his heart had stopped beating.
“I don’t believe I understand,” he muttered.
“Don’t you understand the word ‘separation’?”
“Agree to a separation from what? Great God, you don’t mean a separation from Phoebe?”
“Don’t be a fool! Use your brain, if you’ve got one.”
“Do—you—mean—Nellie?” fell slowly, 88 painfully from the dry lips of the little man in the Morris chair.
“Certainly.”
“Does she want to—to leave me?” The tears started in his big blue eyes. He blinked violently.
“It has come to that. She can’t go on as she has been going. It’s ridiculous. You are anxious to go back to Blakeville, she says. Well, that’s where you belong. Somebody’s drug store out there you’d like to own, I believe. Now, I am prepared to see that you get that drug store and a matter of ten or twenty thousand dollars besides. Money means nothing to me. All you have to do is to make no answer to the charges she will bring––”