“Tell him I will never see him,” she reiterated, but Mrs. Howard answered:
“That is rash, foolish! You are in his own house, and you are his own wife. He will enter your presence by force, if you persist in this silly refusal.”
Fair sprang to her feet with a horrified face.
“Do you mean to tell me that you will not protect me from that wretch?” she panted wildly.
“I should have no right to interfere between man and wife.”
“But you would take the right—you would defend me?” breathlessly.
“No!” Mrs. Howard answered icily, and that refusal seemed to open the floodgates of despair upon the wretched girl.
She fell back into her seat, crying out that the blackest hour of a wretched life had come.
Mrs. Howard looked on, perplexed, appalled. What was to be the end of all this?
She had not anticipated rebellion on the part of Fair against her husband, and she could not understand it, save on the score of what she had asserted just now—her love for Bayard Lorraine.