“I always speak of him as my husband. He may have been married to you, but he was really mine. He was happy out here and I need never to reproach myself for anything I did while he was alive. He always belonged to me and as I’ve often told him, before he passed away, that counts for more than all the banns and marriage certificates in the world. That’s why I didn’t mind his paying you a brief visit. I KNEW he’d come back to me.
“Well, I can’t think of any more that ought to be said. He often spoke of you kindly. The worst he ever said was, ‘Em had an unfortunate temperament.’ I think that was how he put it. He was embalmed on ship, and at his funeral looked very natural. He was a remarkable young-looking man for his age. Well, I will stop now.
“Yours respectively,
“Dora Downes.
“(Mrs. Jason Downes.)
“Postscriptum. The picture is good of all except me and Emma. I never did photograph well. It was a thing Jason always said—that photographs never did me justice.”
When she had finished reading, Emma took up the postcard and looked again at the three strapping sons and the two robust daughters, but her chief interest lay in the figure of Dora Downes (Mrs. Jason Downes!) She was a healthy, rather plain woman, with an enormous shelflike bosom on which her fat double chin appeared to rest. Beside her, Jason appeared, small and dapper and insignificant, like a male spider beside the female who devours her mate after he has filled Nature’s demands.
“She must have been plain always,” thought Emma. “She’s really a repulsive woman.”
Then she rose and, going into the kitchen, lifted an iron plate from the stove, and thrust into the coals the letter and the picture postcard, sending them the way of that other letter left by Jason twenty-seven years earlier.
One thing in the letter she could not forget—“I knew he’d come back to me.”
It was a little more than a year later that Moses Slade and Emma Downes were married quietly in Washington, but not so quietly that Sunday newspapers did not have pictures of the bride and bridegroom taken outside the church. They had come together again, through the strangest circumstances, for Moses, still unmarried, had found himself suddenly involved with Mamie Rhodes, who Emma had once said “did something to men.” He was, in fact, so involved that blackmail or the ruin of a career seemed the only way out ... the only way save marriage with some woman so prominent and so respectable as to suffocate any doubts regarding his breach of morality. “And what woman,” he had asked himself, “fitted such a rôle as well as Emma Downes, who was now a widow ... a real widow whose troublesome son was dead.” He saw with his politician’s eye all the protection she could give him as a prominent figure, known for her moral strictness and respectability, pitied for the trials she had borne with such Christian fortitude. Such a woman, people (voters) would say, could not marry him if the stories about Mamie Rhodes were true.