“Jack, stop!” Mary cried sharply, thrusting herself between the pair. She was dismayed by this unexpected development of her carefully constructed triangle—but if she could end this scene quietly the situation might somehow be saved. “Stop, Jack!” she added warningly. “What she says won’t hurt me.”
Maisie, her control now all gone, turned her fury and scorn full upon Mary. “You adventuress! You common street woman! You cheap seller of yourself! You—you—”
Jack gasped at her enraged words, then broke through Mary’s intervention.
“You shall not say such things about Mary!” he cried in an almost equal rage. “Mary is my wife!”
“Your wife!” repeated Maisie.
“Yes, my wife!”
“Jack, be still!” cried Mary. “Miss Jones, he’s lying to protect me. I don’t like the words you used about me; but in substance they’re the truth.”
“They’re not the truth, Maisie!” Jack, for that moment, had passed beyond Mary’s control. “She’s my wife, and nobody can say such things about her! She’s my wife, and I can prove it!” Swiftly he took a wallet from an inside pocket of his vest, drew a slip of paper from it, and thrust it into Maisie’s hands. “There—look at that!”
There was neither time nor chance for Mary to interfere. Maisie glanced at the slip of paper. Her volcanic wrath suddenly subsided; her face blanched. Then mechanically her lips repeated the script in the printed form she held: “John Harrison Morton and Mary Russell Regan.”
She looked up; she was in a daze. “Your marriage certificate, Jack,” she said in her mechanical tone. And then questioningly: “But Mary Regan?”