“There is no other way. You didn’t think you could come here and begin all over again and live under the same roof with me and have me forget! I tell you I am not brass or wood! No woman was ever so much to any man as you are to me. If I had not been a fool you would have belonged to me; and now, now you are here and we cannot be less to each other than we were once. You know that; I know it!”
She was looking at him questioningly, with a wide-eyed gravity, and she was very white. She lifted her head slightly, as though by the act summoning her own courage, and took a step that brought her close to him; she laid her hands on his shoulders.
“Wayne, I want you to help me—I want you to help me to be a good woman.”
Her pallor had deepened; her lips trembled; the tears shone in her eyes.
“Why did you come here? If you wanted my help you took a strange way of getting it. It strikes me that the reason you came is something that we had better not go into.”
“That is not like you, Wayne. I suppose—I suppose—it would not occur to you that I admire and love your father; that, after the life I have led, the shelter of such a home as this and the protection of such a man mean more than I know how to describe. I haven’t the words to tell you what it means!” she ended with a little moan, and then: “It was only chance that threw me again in your way.”
“I’m not so sure of that,” he replied harshly. “I think your mother must have chuckled to herself at finding that she could catch the father if she couldn’t land the more sophisticated son. She thought she was taking revenge on me. Those are nice things you have”—his eye swept her gown—“and if your mother has gone abroad it’s a fair assumption that she tapped the Craighill till pretty soon after the wedding—if not just before!”
“You have no right to make such insinuations. It’s infamous. I don’t intend that you shall insult me under this roof.”
“Under this roof!” he mocked.
“Oh, I understand that it’s yours; that when your father dies it will belong to you; but while he lives it’s my shelter, it’s my home; the first, Wayne, that I ever had.”