My husband stood for a moment with his mouth agape. Then he began to laugh—loudly, derisively, mockingly.
"Nothing to you, am I? You don't mind bearing my name, though, and when your time comes you'll expect it to cover your disgrace."
His face had become shockingly distorted. He was quivering with fury.
"That's not the worst, either," he cried. "It's not enough that you should tell me to my face that somebody else is your real husband, but you must shunt your spurious offspring into my house. Isn't that what it all comes to . . . all this damnable fuss of your father's . . . that you are going to palm off on me and my name and family your own and this man's . . . bastard?"
And with the last word, in the drunkenness of his rage, he lifted his arm and struck me with the back of his hand across the cheek.
The physical shock was fearful, but the moral infamy was a hundred-fold worse. I can truly say that not alone for myself did I suffer. When my mind, still going at lightning speed, thought of Martin, who loved me so tenderly, I felt crushed by my husband's blow to the lowest depths of shame.
I must have screamed, though I did not know it, for at the next moment Price was in the room and I saw that the housekeeper (drawn perhaps, as before, by my husband's loud voice) was on the landing outside the door. But even that did not serve to restrain him.
"No matter," he said. "After what has passed you may not enjoy to-morrow's ceremony. But you shall go through it! By heaven, you shall! And when it is over, I shall have something to say to your father."
And with that he swung out of the room and went lunging down the stairs.
I was still standing in the middle of the floor, with the blow from my husband's hand tingling on my cheek, when Price, after clashing the door in the face of the housekeeper, said, with her black eyes ablaze: