"She knew him in Toronto. She found him here before she had been in town a week."
"Small world," remarked Walworth, negligently. He played with his penholders.
Mrs. Floyd became silent. Gossip seemed out of the question with an indifferent husband and a preoccupied sister.
Vibert's detection by the girl he had betrayed and discarded, and his desertion of his young wife, were immediately followed by the proper steps on the part of Brainard's attorneys. The old man had received the intelligence of Vibert's double misdeed with a tremendous outburst of wrath and vituperation. His indignation revived in him all the crude violence of his youth; he drew out from the disused corners of his memory such a vocabulary and such turns of phrase as are possible only to one whose boyhood has been spent on the crass and barbaric frontier. He towered and swayed like a rank plant that has sprung rapidly from the earth and has brought up the slime and mould on its sheath and stalk. His prodigal and picturesque indecencies were heard but half understandingly by his son, and were lost, as to everything save their animus, on his advisers.
The equilibrium of the scales (whose mathematical poise he had once proven to his own satisfaction) was now destroyed; this outrage on his daughter and himself and all his belongings put another and a different face on the matter. The girl was received back into her father's house. It was the understanding that she was to remain there until the legal undoing of all this mischief had been accomplished, and that, afterwards, she must prepare herself for an indefinite exile among certain of her father's relatives still resident in Centralia.
During this interval Brainard allowed himself only the minimum of communication with his daughter; her mother's fluttering sympathies were too tenuous and too faded to furnish anything very definite or vivid in the way of consolation; her brother did not readily abandon himself to the softer feelings—particularly when work of so much sterner character was before them; and but for her sister this crushed and unfortunate child would have received but slender support and comfort. Abbie was not only sister, but mother and family circle too; she found a use for all the pent-up tenderness and domesticity of her nature.
The bill in the case of Vibert vs. Vibert was filed without receiving any undue attention from the press. Some exertions were taken, some influence was used, and the matter merely made a cold, official, numerical appearance in the legal columns of such of the dailies as affect complete court reports. The relations between Vibert and Jane Doane, however, made too good a "story" to be ignored in every quarter; some brief mention of it appeared in a new and struggling one-cent evening paper. The friends and well-wishers of the Brainards were surprised by the extent of that paper's circulation—a good many people appeared to have seen it.
The case of Vibert vs. Vibert had its place near the head of a short docket and was reached with much less than the usual delay. It was tried quietly and privately rather late one afternoon at a sitting which might have been termed either a prolongation of the regular session or a supplement to it. Perhaps only a legal mind could have distinguished; probably the legal mind that dominated the occasion did not attempt the distinction.
