He was paying no attention. Now he turned to her, his face drawn with emotion and his voice shaking.
“Reliance,” he cried, “you don’t know—by the Lord, you don’t know what that girl has come to be to me. I—I love her as much as I did—as I did Bella, my own wife, when she was living. I swear I believe that’s so. She’ll marry somebody some day; I am reconciled to that—or I try to be. It’s natural. It is what is bound to happen. But I’ll have something to say about who her husband shall be. I know men and it’s got to be a mighty fine man who can satisfy me he’s the right husband for her. A good-for-nothing who wastes his time painting chromos—a boy without any business sense—”
“How do you know he hasn’t got any business sense?”
“Would he be a picture painter if he had? And a Cook! Good Lord! think of it! a Cook!... There! What’s the use talking to you? You are a sentimental old maid and all that counts with you is the mush you read in the fool books you get out of the library. If you loved that girl the way I do—”
She had risen now and she broke in upon him sharply.
“I do,” she vowed. “I love her as much as you do and more, perhaps. She lived with me years longer than she has with you and I love her as much as you ever dreamed of doin’. Yes, and a whole lot more unselfishly—that I know, too.”
“But, Reliance, to give her up to—”
“Oh, be still! I gave her up to you, didn’t I? Do you think that wasn’t a wrench?”
He could not deny it, for he knew it to be true. He shrugged and picked up his hat.
“Good-by,” he said.