"If that is really all, Mr. Bolan," says she, "I would advise you to outlive your nonsense, as I've outlived mine. Try paying your tailor with kind words."
"Katie," says he, with a sob in his voice, "you—you've broken the heart of me. Come, McCabe, we will go."
She stands watchin' us, smilin' cynical, until we're almost through the door; and then—well, it's a sigh that comes out explosive. She starts as if she meant to dash after us, and then stops with her arms out.
"Larry!" says she, almost in a whisper.
It pulls him up, and he stares at her a minute over his shoulder. "It's no use, Katie," says he. "What's turned you hard and cold I don't know; but you can't unsay what's been said. And it hurt—bitter."
"Oh, I know, I know!" says she. "But you must hear what it was that changed me from the girl you knew. Money, Larry, the money for which I married. As for the man—oh, I suppose he was no worse than the rest; only he taught me to love a dollar more than anything else in earth or heaven. He'd wrung all of his from a grudging world with his bare hands,—starved and slaved and plotted for it, in mean ways, against mean men; then fought to hold it. And he knew to a penny's worth what every dollar he spent should buy for him. Among other things, he bought me. Sixty-odd he was; I barely twenty. Why call it differently? I was fool enough, too, to think I was a lucky girl. Ah, what a fool! Seven years of fear and hate! It's an awful thing, Larry, to live so long with hate in you for one at your side. But he—he never knew."
She leaves off, squeezin' one hand in the other until the ends of the fingers went white, her chest heavin', her eyes stary. Larry watches her without a word.
"Tell me," says she after a bit, "why you ran away that time and left me to—to make such a mess of things. Why?"
"For the same reason that I'm going away again now," says he. "I've a thousand pounds a year, and not sense enough to keep myself on it, let alone a wife. So it's good-by, Katie."
Then the weeps came, open eyed; but she didn't try to hide 'em. "Oh, oh!" she moans. "But I was so lonely then, and—and I'm so lonely now!"