“Then you ought to leave him—for your own sake. Leave him before you are compelled to do so.”
“Not before, Robert.”
“But why?”
“Oh, Robert, don’t you see?” she answered, breaking down. “He is my husband.”
And nothing else could they get from her. Though she cried and sobbed, and did not deny that her life was a fear and a misery, yet she would go back to him; go back on the morrow; it was her duty. In the moment’s anger Robert Ashton said he would wash his hands of her as well as of Bird. But Jane and Lucy knew better.
“What can have induced you and Robert to take up this poor Clara in the way you are doing—and mean to do?” she asked when she was alone with Jane at the close of the evening.
“I—owe a debt of gratitude; and I thought I could best pay it in this way,” was Mrs. Ashton’s timid and rather unwilling answer.
“A debt of gratitude! To Clara?”
“No. To Heaven.”