“Deserted!”
She let him read the letter, and when he had finished, explained the parts he did not understand, telling him now what Morris had confessed—telling him too that in her first sorrow, when life and sense seemed reeling, she had sent for Dr. Grant, knowing she could trust him and be right in doing whatever he advised.
“Why did you say you sent for him—that is, what was the special reason?” Mr. Cameron asked, and Katy told him her belief that Genevra was living—that it was she who made the bridal trousseau for Wilford’s second wife, she who nursed his child until it died, giving to it her own name, arraying it for the grave, and then leaving before the father came.
“I never told Wilford,” Katy said. “I felt as if I would rather he should not know it yet. Perhaps I was wrong, but if so, I have been terribly punished.”
Mr. Cameron could not look upon the woman who stood before him, so helpless and stricken in her desolation, and believe her wrong in anything. The guilt lay in another direction, and when, as the terrible reality that she was indeed a deserted wife came rushing over Katy, she tottered toward him for help; he stretched his arms out for her, and taking the sinking figure in them, laid it upon the sofa as gently, as kindly, as Wilford had ever touched it in his most loving days.
Katy did not faint nor weep. She was past all that; but her face was like a piece of marble, and her eyes were like those of the hunted fawn when the chase is at its height, and escape impossible.
“Wilford will come back, of course,” the father said, “but that does not help us now. What the plague—who is ringing that bell enough to break the wire?” he added, as a sharp, rapid ring echoed through the house, and was answered by Esther. “It’s my wife,” he continued, as he caught the sound of her voice in the hall.
“You stay here while I meet her first alone. I’ll give it to her for cheating me so long, and raising thunder generally!”
Katy tried to protest, but he was half way down the stairs, and in a moment more was with his wife, who, impatient at his long delay, had come herself, armed and equipped, to censure Katy as the cause of Wilford’s disappearance, and to demand of her what she had done. But the lady who came in so haughty and indignant was a very different personage from the lady who, after listening for fifteen minutes to a fearful storm of oaths and reproaches, mingling with startling truths and bitter denunciations against herself and her boy, sank into a chair, pale and trembling, and overwhelmed with the harvest she was reaping.
But her husband was not through with her yet. He had reserved the bitterest drop for the last, and coming close to her he said,