Hazel’s face, which, as her fancy ranged over these attractive possibilities, had shown varying stages of flushed and exhilarated excitement, now suddenly fell. Conscious that she had exhibited a condition of mind that was low and sordid, she hastily sought to obliterate the effect of her words by saying sharply,
“Of course, I knew she wasn’t going to accept. I never had such an idea. I’d be the first one to turn it down. I was just thinking what she could do if she did.”
“Oh, there’s any amount of things I could do,” said Berny. “They want me to go abroad and live there. That was”—she was going to say “one of the conditions,” but this, too, she decided to suppress, and said instead—“one of the things they suggested. They told me the income of the money would go twice as far there. Then the year while I was deserting Dominick—I was to go to Chicago, or New York, and desert him that way—I’d have seven thousand dollars for my expenses. They weren’t mean about it, I’ll say that much for them.”
“And then laying it all out like that!” said Hannah. “It’s just the most scandalous thing I’ve ever heard of. I’ve never had much opinion of Mrs. Ryan, but I really didn’t believe she’d go that far.”
“But Dominick?” said Hazel suddenly; “what about Dominick? What did he say?”
The matter of Dominick was the difficult part of the revelation. Berny felt the necessity of a certain amount of dissembling, and it helped to chill the excitement and heat that had carried her up to her sisters and on to this point. Dominick’s part of the story was one of the subjects upon which she had decided to let her remarks be as notes about the text, and expurgated notes at that. Now, she realized it was a complicated matter of which to tell only half, and looking on the floor pricked the carpet with the tip of her parasol, and tried to maintain her tone of airy indifference.
“Dominick doesn’t know anything about it,” she said. “He’s never to know. They were pretty decided on that point. He’s to be deserted without his own knowledge or consent.”
“But to take his wife away from him!” Hannah cried. “To rob him of her! They must be crazy.”
“Dominick can get along all right without me,” said Dominick’s wife, looking at the tip of her parasol as she prodded the carpet.
Hazel, the married sister, heard something in these words that the spinster did not recognize. A newly-wakened intelligence, startled and suspicious, dawned on her face.