His back was to Roy; his meaning gaze upon herself was, to her perception, audacious insolence. Not daring to resent it in Roy's hearing, she yet obeyed the wifely impulse to seek his protection.
"That is for your cousin to decide. My name belongs to him!" She said it proudly, flashing her wide eyes from one to the other, and moving involuntarily nearer to Roy.
Wyllys caught up the last words.
"His relations should be yours, if the partnership be in good faith, and on equal terms."
"That is for him to decide!" answered she, precisely as before.
"Thank you! I do not shirk the responsibility," said Roy putting himself in the breach as usual, when he saw her non-plussed or disturbed. "Another sip of nectar, Orrin, before you breast the storm?"
A wry face was the response, and the most fascinating man in Hamilton bowed himself out. As he drew the door to after him, he glanced across the hall. The room Roy had showed him as his was opposite, and the door open. There was fire in that grate also; a lady's sewing-chair in front of it, and a work-box he recognized as Jessie's on the small table beside it. On the back of the chair hung a linen apron, with pockets, such as he had seen her wear when engaged in household tasks in Dundee, or gardening. He guessed directly that she had stopped in there to lay it off when she brought up the gargle. That this was her apartment, he was sure, when another step revealed a bureau with a ladies' dressing-case open upon it.
"Separate apartments!" he mused, picking his steps lightly down the cottage stairs. "Very unsentimental! Very un-American! decidedly independent and jolly. But, in this case, what is the meaning of it?"
He believed he had the clue to the mystery before he inserted his latch-key in the door of his—or his wife's—house. Jessie Fordham could not forget that Jessie Kirke had loved him. The decent show of conjugal felicity he had witnessed that day was a hollow crust below which the lava still surged and seethed. Jessie was more faithful to the one great passion of her life, and less philosophical than he had been ready to believe. Her scrupulous avoidance of him whenever this could be done without awakening suspicion; the half bitter retorts that fell now and then from the lips she would train to the utterance of conventional lies; the indignant sparkle of the eyes that answered the searching appeal of his—what were all these but the ill-concealed tokens of an attachment that had so inwrought itself with the fibres of heart and being as to defy her strenuous attempts to pluck it forth, or keep it out of sight. It was a revelation to him, and a flattering one—one that merited serious consideration.
The devil gat hold of him in that hour; sifted him as wheat, bringing all that was base in his nature uppermost. Heretofore, he had shunned everything that could secure for him the reputation of a cicisbeo. When a woman was once married, she became an object of indifference to him. He accounted the pursuit of such, a hazardous and flavorless exhibition of Lothario-ism which the refined age should frown down. He was not a gourmand or libertine, he had often proudly asserted to himself. Pleasures of that stamp he left to men of grosser tastes and coarser grain. He had meant to allow his cousin all the domestic peace which should honestly fall to his share, and to cultivate amicable relations with his cousin-in-law—Roy's wife, who had given conclusive evidence of intelligent appreciation of himself.