"What if his wife is dying?" called out the infuriated old wretch. "Is that any reason for lying down when he has slighted my daughter and robbed me!"
"For shame, father! For shame!" She hid her face in her hands, and her tears gushed through them.
Ogden paused, stung and quivering. His hands dropped; his fingers relaxed. His wife was dying! Nobody had told him that before, and he had never dared to tell it to himself. But it was true, and he knew it.
Abbie rose again and confronted her father. The tears were still in her eyes and a wide blush suffused her cheeks.
"Father, you shall not punish him. He may have done wrong, but there was reason for it. And any wrong he has done can be set right."
Ogden's eyes were bedimmed, but through the moisture he seemed to see again the sight that closed the evening of his one-day wedding journey towards the north; again he stood on the bridge, and the sun set over one lake while the moon rose over the other. Only now, with Abbie Brainard's blushes before his body's eye and his wife's pale face before his mind's eye, a confusion came alike over his thought and his vision; it was now the sun rising on him at the moment that the pallid moon was going down. He looked at her and she looked at him, and in the eyes of both there was read the confession of a great mistake. Then her eyes drooped for shame and his for disloyalty, and neither one was able to look into the other's face again.
"Do you defend him?" her father cried. "Can you forgive her? I can't do either. No quarter; don't ask it, Abbie. He has chosen his course—he is responsible for his acts. And he shall answer for them, as any other man must who crosses me."
He flung open the door and passed out. Fairchild stood anxiously over the chair in which Abbie lay back panting for breath. Ogden pressed her hand and turned towards his mother.
"Come, let us go," he said, and the two passed out into the great vestibule of the Clifton. He signalled the elevator.
"Wait for me here, mother—five minutes;" he spoke in a voice which she hardly recognized as his. "Twelfth," she heard him say to the boy inside.