She drew herself to her full height, and confronted him with a spirit he had never seen her manifest before.
"As—you—please!" she said, with freezing deliberation; and, pulling from her hand the silken sock she had been mending for him when he came in, she tossed it upon the floor at his feet. She held his eye for another brief moment, and he cringed visibly beneath the contemptuous renunciation that he read in the look. The next he was alone. Helen had fled to her chamber, where she fell, half fainting, upon her bed, her heart broken, her spirit crushed.
A little later she heard the outer door close with a bang, and knew that her husband had left the house. Would he ever return? Would she really care if he never returned?
Her burdens and trials had been very heavy and perplexing during most of her married life. She had tried to be brave, loyal, and self-sacrificing; she had laid her all upon the altar of her love for this man, only to have her unceasing immolation ignored, as of no special value, except in so far as it had relieved him of care, clothed, fed, and sheltered him. Now the last straw had been laid upon her by his shameless devotion to a brazen actress, regardless of the taint upon his own reputation and the scandal it must entail upon his family. It seemed, as she lay there, half conscious, as if this blow had crushed every atom of affection for him out of her heart, and she began to feel that, as far as she was concerned, it might be a blessed release to be free from him forever. Yet for his own and Dorothy's sake, she would have continued to bear her cross indefinitely and without a murmur, to save him from sin and to shield her child from the disgrace that now threatened them all.
Days passed and lengthened into weeks, during which she did not once see or hear from her husband; but one afternoon, upon returning from an engagement out of town, she found that he had been in the house and removed all of his personal belongings, together with the choicest of his paintings and some rare curios which he had collected during their honeymoon abroad. This act convinced her that he intended their separation to be final.
She had told Dorothy something of the recent stormy interview between her husband and herself, because she believed it best to prepare her for what she feared might be the outcome of it before very long.
During the earlier portion of her brief life Dorothy had been very fond of her father, and he had always manifested a strong affection for her; but during the last two years Helen had observed that the girl often avoided him, that she grieved over his growing indifference to his obligations and his home; while not infrequently she had openly resented his treatment of her mother.
When Helen told her she thought it probable that her father would leave them altogether, the girl sat in silent thought for several minutes. Then she lifted adoring eyes to her mother's face.
"Mamma, if he wants to go away from such a lovely wife as you have been, because he—he likes that coarse, loud-talking woman I saw him with that day, I—I'd just let him go, and—and be glad to have him away," she said, her face growing crimson, her eyes flashing resentment in view of her father's wrongdoing.
"But, Dorrie, dear, he is your father, and——"