"He was over-hasty," he muttered, in half-apology. "What I said was for his interest. I intended no offence."
"Will you follow him, and say so?"
"Certainly not! If he chooses to take umbrage, let him. It's no affair of mine."
"Then I will go--and not return until he comes with me, invited by you!"
The woman's figure, scornfully erect, trembled with the excitement of the position she had on the moment assumed; but her beautiful face, refined and spiritualized of late by the imprint of womanhood's saddening wisdom, was coldly resolute. By contrast with the burly form and red, rough countenance of the man she confronted, she seemed made of another clay.
"Yes, I will go!" she went on, hurriedly. "This last is too much! It is not fit that I should keep up the pretence longer."
The husband burst out with a rude and somewhat hollow laugh. "Pretence, you say! Nay, madam, you miscall it. A pretence is a thing that deceives, and I have never been deceived. Do not flatter yourself. I have read you like a page of large print, these twenty months. Like the old gaffer whose feathers I ruffled here a while ago with a few words of truth, your tongue has been here, but your thoughts have been with the Dutchman in Albany!"
The poor girl flushed and recoiled under the coarse insult, and the words did not come readily with which to repel it.
"I know not how to answer insolence of this kind," she said, at last. "I have been badly reared for such purposes."
She felt her calmness deserting her as she spoke; her eyes began to burn with the starting tears. This crisis in her life had sprung into being with such terrible swiftness, and yawned before her now, as reflection came, with such blackness of unknown consequences, that her woman's strength quaked and wavered. The tears found their way to her cheeks now, and through them she saw, not the heavy, half-drunken young husband, but the handsome, slender, soft-voiced younger lover of three years ago. And then the softness came to her voice too.