“You love drink better than you love me. I have done with you.”
She was a woman and took a woman's view of the case.
When he came back to their rooms that night, she was not there. Then he knew how much he loved her and how much he had underestimated his love.
She did not go to her parents. There was a very musty proverb that she knew would meet her on the threshold. “You made your bed, now lie on it.” Her father was a man of no originality, hence he would have put it in that way.
She got employment in a photograph gallery, where she made herself useful by being ornamental, sitting behind a desk in the anteroom.
I know not what duties devolve upon the woman who occupies that post in the average photographer's service; whatever they are she performed them. But within a very short time after she had left the “bed and board” of Busted Blake, she had to ask for a vacation. She spent it in a hospital and Busted became a father. She resumed her chair behind the photographer's desk in due time, found a boarding-house where infants were not tabooed, and managed to subsist, and to care for her child—a girl.
Somebody lived in that boarding-house who knew Busted Blake, and it was through inquiries resulting from, this somebody's jocularly calling him “papa” one night in a saloon that Busted was made aware of his accession to the paternal relation.
When the poor wretch heard the news, he made a prodigious effort to keep his face composed. But the muscles would not be resisted. He burst out crying, and he laid his head upon his arm upon a beer-flooded table and wept copiously, causing a sudden hush to fall upon the crowd of topers and a group to gather around his table and stare at him,—some mystified, some grinning, none understanding.
The next day he made a herculean effort to pull himself together. He obtained a position as draughtsman from one who had known him in his respectable period, and he went tremblingly and sheepishly to call upon his wife and child.
The consequence of his visit was a reunion, which endured for two whole weeks. At the end of that time she cast him off in utter scorn.