“It is serious,” she said slowly. “It’s something that you won’t like to hear about.”
“Hit me with it,” he said, wondering a little what it could be. “Gene’s gone and a child could eat out of my hand now.”
Looking into the fire, Rose said,
“I was out walking this afternoon and down in the Union Street plaza a woman stopped me. I’d never seen her before. She was Mrs. Dominick Ryan.”
The old man’s face became a study. A certain whimsical tenderness that was generally in it when he spoke to his daughter vanished as if by magic. It was as if a light had gone out. He continued to look at her with something of blankness in his countenance, as if, for the first moment of shock, every faculty was held in suspense, waiting for the next words. He held his cigar, nipped between a pair of stumpy fingers, out away from him over the arm of the chair.
“Well,” he said quietly, “and what had she to say to you?”
“The most disagreeable things I think any one ever said to me in my life. If they’re true, they’re just too dreadful——” she stopped, balking from the final disclosure.
“Suppose you tell me what they were?” he said with the same almost hushed quietness.
“She said that you and Mrs. Ryan were offering her money—a good deal of money, three hundred thousand dollars was the amount, I think—to leave her husband so that he could get a divorce from her, and then—” she swallowed as if to swallow down this last unbearable indignity,—“and then be free to marry me.”
So Berny had told all. If deep, unspoken curses could have killed her, she would have died that moment.