Without looking again at his wife, he left the room.
Bessie had played blindly her last card, the wife's last card, and lost! There was bitterness and rebellion in her heart. She had loved her husband,—hadn't she shown it by marrying him instead of the mine owner? She had been a good woman, not because she hadn't had her chances of other men's admiration, as she sometimes let her husband know. Dickie Lawton had made love to her outrageously, and the last time the old Senator had been in St. Louis,—well, he would never come again to her house. Not a shadow of disloyalty had ever crossed her heart.
Bessie thought that a good wife must be chaste, of course; other matters of wifely duty were less distinct.
No! her husband did not care for her any more,—that was the real cause of their troubles. It was hard to wake up to such a fact after nine years of marriage with a man whom you loved!
There was a tragedy between, but not the one that Bessie suspected, nor the mere tragedy of extravagance. Each realized dimly that the other hindered rather than promoted that something within which each held tenaciously as most precious. Instead of giving mutually, they stole mutually, and the end of that sort of life must be concubinage or the divorce court—or a spiritual readjustment beyond the horizon of either Falkner or his wife.
* * * * *
"Did you know that the Falkners were going to give up their house?" Lane asked his wife.
"No, indeed. I saw Bessie at the symphony the other day, and she spoke of going out to Denver to visit her mother; but she didn't say anything about the house. Are you sure?"
"Yes; Falkner told Bainbridge he was selling it. And he wanted Bainbridge to see if there was an opening for him on the road in the East. I am afraid things haven't gone well with them."
"After all the trouble they had building, and such a pretty house! What a shame!"