Garford returned to the chair, and this nervous shifting did not escape her, or the straining of his clasped fingers held against his lips as he answered, with forced calm:
“You should know.”
She tried, while gaining time, to turn it off lightly while assuming an attitude of frankness:
“Surely, you don’t object to Mr. Bowden’s coming in here for a nightcap and a cigar! You are not as prudish as that, and if you were, you know I have done it a hundred times; that would be too ridiculous, Dan! You aren’t going to make a scene over this!”
“Is that all you have to say to me—that I should know,” he asked, when she had finished.
She bit her lip, tried to answer, and succeeded only in staring at him. She also began to be horribly afraid.
“And you, Mr. Bowden?”
The young fellow had an answer ready, glib on his tongue, but, at the look in the husband’s eyes, it vanished. In the palms of his hands the perspiration began to rise. Before the avenging dignity in the glance of this man whom he had so many times smiled at in the satisfied disdain of the social freebooter, he felt himself all at once insignificant, as a chip of wood swept under a great surf. She understood that she could expect no help from him and desperately began to counterfeit anger.
“I will not be insulted like this,” she cried furiously. “I demand that you open that door and end this absurd, this humiliating scene. I——”
“Stop!” he said roughly, and she comprehended how completely he dominated the scene by the cold weakness, the powerless sense of inaction which fell on her at the sound of his voice. “Tell Mr. Bowden what I laid down to you as the rules of our marriage.”