“Then what are you doing it for?”
“I am not doing it.”
“You’re a liar,” she cried furiously. “You’re worse than a liar. You’re a thief. You’re trying to get him every way you know how. You sit there looking at me with a face like a little innocent, and you know there’s not a thing you can do to get him away from me you’re not doing. If a common chippy, a gutter girl, acted that way they’d call her some pretty dirty names, names that would make you sit up if you thought any one would use them to you. But I don’t see where there’s any difference. You think because you’re rich and on top of the heap that you can do anything. Just let me tell you, Miss Rose Cannon, you can’t steal Dominick Ryan from me. You may be Bill Cannon’s daughter, with all the mines of the Comstock behind you, but you can’t buy my husband.”
Rose was aghast. The words of Berny’s outburst were nothing to her, sound and fury, the madness of a jealous woman. That this was a loving wife fighting for the husband whose heart she had lost was all she understood and heard. That was the tragic, the appalling thought. The weight of her own guilty conscience seemed dragging her down into sickened silence. The only thing it seemed to her she could honestly say was to refute the woman’s accusations that Dominick was being stolen from her.
“Mrs. Ryan,” she implored, “whatever else you may think, do please understand that I am not trying to take your husband away from you. You’re making a mistake. I don’t know what you’ve heard or guessed, but you’re distracting yourself without any necessity. How could I ever do that? I never meet him. I never see him.”
She leaned forward in her eagerness. Berny cast a biting, sidelong look at her.
“How about Sunday morning on Telegraph Hill?” she said.
“I did meet him there, that’s true,”—a memory of the conversation augmented the young girl’s sense of guilt. If half this woman said was madness, half was fact. Dominick loved Rose Cannon, not his wife, and to Rose that was the whole tragedy. Meetings, words, renouncements were nothing. She stammered in her misery.
“Yes,—but—but—you must believe me when I tell you that that time and once before—one evening in the moonlight on the steps of our house—were the only times I’ve seen your husband since I came back from Antelope.”
“Well, I don’t,” said Berny, “I don’t for a moment believe you. You must take me for the easiest fruit that ever grew on the tree if you think I’ll swallow a fairy tale like that. If you met once on Telegraph Hill, and once in the moonlight, what’s to prevent your meeting at other times, and other places? You haven’t mentioned the visits up at your house and the dinner to-night.”