"The whole company may know to-morrow!" she answered, drying her eyes. "Seeing that I shall be gone, they may as well know to-morrow as later. Oh, how they will talk, all of them, how they'll talk about me—the Bowmans, and that boy, too!"
"You'll be gone to-morrow—what do you say?"
"Do you suppose——"
"Mary, there are—I must make some—good heavens! how will you go?—where? Mary, listen: by-and-by, when something is settled, in—in a month or more—I want to arrange to send—I couldn't let you want for money, don't you see!"
"I would not take a penny from you," she said, "not the value of a penny, if I were dying. I wouldn't, as Christ hears me! Our life together is over—I am going away."
He looked at her aghast.
"Now," he ejaculated, "at once? In the middle of the night?"
"Now at once—in the middle of the night."
"Be reasonable"—he caught her fingers, and held them in miserable expostulation—"wait till day, at any rate. You're beside yourself, there's nothing to be gained by it. In the morning, if you must——"
"Oh!" she choked, "did you think I would stop here an hour after this? Did you—did you think so? You man! Yes, I should be no worse to you I but to me, the lowness of it! All in a moment the lowness of it! I've tried to feel that we were married; I always believed it was your trouble that I had to be what I was. If you had ever heard—as soon as it was possible, I thought every minute 'd have been a burden to you till you had made it all real and right. To stop with you now, the thing I am—despised—on sufferance——"