“The three hundred thousand dollars that your father offered me yesterday afternoon to leave my husband and let him get a divorce from me.”
Rose sat down on the bench and turned a startled face on the speaker.
“Tell me that again,” she said. “I don’t quite understand it.”
Berny gave a little, dry laugh.
“Oh, as many times as you like,” she said with her most ironical air of politeness, “only, I should think it would be rather stale news to you by this time. Yesterday afternoon your father made me his third offer to desert my husband and force him to divorce me at the end of a year. The offers have gone up from fifty thousand dollars—that was the first one, and, all things considered, I thought it was pretty mean—to the three hundred thousand they tried me with yesterday. Mrs. Ryan was supposed to have made the first offer, but your father did the offering. This last time he had to come out and show his hand and admit that one-third of the money was from him.” She turned and looked at Rose with a cool, imperturbable impudence. “It’s good to have rich parents, isn’t it?”
Rose stared back without answering. She had become very pale.
“Then how do you account for the money that was
offered me yesterday?” Page [407]
“That,” said Berny, giving her head a judicial nod, and delivering her words with a sort of impersonal suaveness, “is the way it was managed; you were kept carefully out. I wasn’t supposed to know there was a lady in the case, but of course I did. You can’t negotiate the sale of a husband as you do that of a piece of real estate, especially when his wife objects. That, Miss Cannon, was the difficulty. While all you people were so anxious to buy, I was not willing to sell. It takes two to make a bargain.”
Rose, pale now to her lips, said in a low voice,