What could be more exemplary and satisfactory? He had a model wife. Would sulks, tears, and chidings have been more to his taste? This conclusion reached, he would berate himself for “an unreasonable dog”—and go on missing something he could not define.
An odd conceit came to Agnes as the full, manly voice began “The Story of Walter King”—a fancy that won a smile from her at first, and terrified her when she could not shake it off. She was the unsuspected mother of a foundling. In secret and in fear, she had laid the new-born baby at a stranger’s door. He had cared for, fostered, and clothed it, and on this New Year’s Day, her husband had ignorantly adopted the waif and led it, a beautiful child, to her, bespeaking her admiration for it.
For her own baby! the thing born of her soul, the express image of her thought, the bright, glorious darling in whom, and with whom, and by whom, she had lived all these weary, weary months! Her husband would introduce these two to one another! Was her left hand a stranger to her right? Was her heart alien to the blood leaping from it?
She could have laughed and cried hysterically, could have snatched the book from the unconscious reader and covered it with tears and kisses. She must touch and hold it once, if but for a minute, or the strained heart-strings would part.
“Can you see well?” she interrupted the reader to ask. The calm tone surprised herself and lent her courage to carry out her stratagem. “Does the light fall right for you? In her anxiety to exclude draughts and the snow glare, Mrs. Ames may have made it too dark for well people. Is the type pretty clear?”
She put out her hand and drew the volume from his. The sight of familiar paragraphs and names was as if the child had laughed, in happy recognition, into her eyes. She passed her fingers lovingly over the page, stroked the binding, raised the open book to her lips, and gave it back reluctantly.
“The smell of newly printed pages is delicious to me,” she said, trying to laugh. “Sweeter than new-mown hay.”
“They have brought it out in good style,” observed Barton carelessly. “One gets no slipshod literature from that house. Their imprint is a title of intellectual nobility.”
Agnes smiled brightly in assent, turned her cheek to the cushioned back of her chair, and closed her eyes to keep the happy tears from slipping beneath the lids. Was the time close at hand in which she could safely acknowledge her offspring? To screen the fact of her maternity from possible premature discovery she had refrained from so much as looking upon or speaking of the bantling for these long weeks. Providence had put this opportunity of honorable recognition before her. How should she seize it?
A thought struck her like an icebolt. What would Barton say, even in this auspicious hour, to the systematic concealment practiced before and since the advent of the adopted child? Would he throw it from him as he would a snake? She pictured the possibility of virtuous horror in the regards turned upon her, the aversion a moral man feels for a lost woman. Deception—even untruth might be forgiven; the deliberate disregard of his expressed wish that his wife should never again put sentiment or feeling of hers into print would be construed into absolute crime. He held the desire for literary renown on the part of a woman to be a fault that unsexed her. In a young girl the ambition might spring from the unrest of an unfilled heart, mistaken, but pardonable as a blunder of ignorance. A wife’s heart, thoughts, and hands should be full of home and home loves, or she did not deserve her high and blessed estate.