Her words came bitingly: "You can't help it. You sowed. You can't pardon a seed from growing."
"I can help it, and I will. The past is no more mine than hers—our marriage was legal, but it bound me no more than it bound her. She chose her own companions. I have been building up a respectable life, here in Littleburg. You shall not overturn the labor of the last ten years. You can go. My will is unalterable. Go—and do what you can!"
Instead of anger, Fran showed sorrow: "How long have you been married to the second Mrs. Gregory—the present one?"
He turned his back upon her as if to go to the door, but he wheeled about: "Ten years. You understand? Ten years of the best work of my life that you want to destroy."
"Poor lady!" murmured Fran. "The first Mrs. Gregory—my 'friend'— has been dead only three years. You and she were never divorced. The lady that you call Mrs. Gregory now,—she isn't your wife, is she?"
"I thought—" he was suddenly ashen pale—"but I thought that she—I believed her dead long ago—I was sure of it—positive. What you say is impossible—"
"But no one can sow without reaping," Fran said, still pityingly. "When you sang those words, it was only a song to you, but music is just a bit of life's embroidery, while you think it life itself. You don't sow, or reap in a choir loft. You can't sow deeds and reap words."
"I understand you, now," he faltered. "You have come to disgrace me. What good will that do you, or—or my first wife? You are no abstraction, to represent sowing or reaping, but a flesh-and-blood girl who can go away if she chooses—"
"She chooses to stay," Fran assured him.
"Then you have resolved to ruin me and break my wife's heart! "The sweet uncomplaining face of the second Mrs. Gregory rose before him. And Grace Noir—what would she think?