“You—oh, that’s different; you wouldn’t be interested, dear.” He shook his head with a kind of rueful amusement. “I always feel when I tell you of such things that you are wondering how I could enjoy them. It came sort of easy to talk to Mrs. Catherwood—she seemed to understand; some people do make you feel that way, you know.” He looked up a little sadly, and then came over to his wife and kissed her. “You’re a saint, Milly, and saints are not expected to take stock in vain jestings. You have to be good for both of us, you know.”
Milly flushed angrily. “I wish you wouldn’t say such things—you take such a low view! And I wanted you to see something of Professor Stearns to-night, he is such a fine man, so thoroughly high-minded, so firm in principle, he never gives way an inch in what he thinks is right. How people dislike him for it! It’s really splendid.”
Norton looked humorous, but discreetly held his peace.
“I tell you, Jordan,” he said one day to a friend, half sadly, half jestingly, “my wife wants me to be a good woman, to like all the things she likes, and to do all the things she does. I know she mourns over me every day of her life. I suppose it’s a hopeless job for both of us. I never was anything but a commonplace sort of fellow, not near good enough for her.”
“That is the proper frame of mind, old fellow,” said his friend, and they went on riding together in silence.
To what end had the higher life been Milly’s? In five years she and Norton had been drifting slowly but surely ever further apart. Had companionship with her elevated him? Impossible not to see that he had deteriorated, that the lax hold on former ideals had lapsed entirely!
Can any human soul thrive in an atmosphere of doubt?
It was when this knowledge of further separation lay heaviest upon her, that word came to Milly one morning in the bright sunlight that Norton had been arrested for embezzlement and was in jail. Her heart stood still. This, then, was what she had been foreboding all along; the instantaneous conviction of his guilt was the cruel blow. Oh, the awful, awful wrench of the heart, when disgrace lays its hand on one we love! Death seems an honest, joyful thing in comparison. Yet she could think of a thousand extenuations for him—she found herself yearning over him as she might have done over the children that had never been hers.
She prayed all the way to jail. How often she had read of similar journeys—the prisoner was always “sitting on the side of his bed,” in the cell. Norton was sitting on the side of his bed; his face was turned away as she came in. She sat down beside him and took his hand. “Norton!” she said and yet again, “Norton!” and he turned and looked at her.
“I knew you would come,” he said, “and I knew—you would think—I had done it.”