She could not make him jealous. She knew that he would have been only too relieved if she had fallen in love with some one else, and had been taken off his hands.
He always treated her in a cool, lordly manner—a manner that always impressed her with his superiority. She was obliged to acknowledge him her master; she could never make him her slave.
And now he was to live, and she was his wife. She would share his magnificent home, all the grandeur that his position would bring to her. She had been brought up to regard money as the one aim of existence. Money she must have. She coveted power, and she was girl of the world enough to know that money meant power.
"Yes, he will live; but whether he will gain his full reasoning powers is a matter the future alone can decide," the doctors declare.
Two long months, and Doctor Gardiner is slowly convalescing. His young wife flits about the room, a veritable dream in her dainty lace-trimmed house-gowns, baby pink ribbons tying back her yellow curls. But he looks away from her toward the window with a weary sigh.
He has married her, and he tells himself over and over again, that he must make the best of it. But "making the best of it" is indeed a bitter pill, for she is not his style of woman.
During the time he has been convalescing, he has been studying her, and as one trait after another unfolds itself, he wonders how it will all end.
He sees she has a passionate craving for the admiration of men. She makes careful toilets in which to receive his friends when they call to inquire after his health; and last, but not least, she has taken to the wheel, and actually appears before him in bloomers.
What would his haughty old mother and his austere sister say when they learned this?
There had been quite an argument between the young husband and Sally on the day he received his mother's letter informing him of her return from abroad, and her intense amazement at his hasty marriage.