CHAPTER XV.
"MADAM!"
They had reached their own apartments, and Mrs. Dexter was moving forward past her husband. The stern imperative utterance caused her to pause and turn round.
"We leave for home in the morning!" said Mr. Dexter.
"We?" His wife looked at him fixedly as she made the simple interrogation.
"Yes, we!" was answered, and in the voice of one who had made up his mind, and did not mean to be thwarted in his purpose.
"Mr. Dexter!" his wife stood very erect before him; her eyes did not quail beneath his angry glances; nor was there any sign of weakness in her low, even tones. "Let me warn you now—and regard the warning as for all time—against any attempt to coerce me into obedience to your arbitrary exactions. Your conduct to-night was simply disgraceful—humiliating to yourself, and mortifying and unjust to your wife. Let us have no more of this. There is a high wall between us, Mr. Dexter—high as heaven and deep as—." Her feelings were getting the rein and she checked herself. "Your own hands have built it," she resumed in a colder tone, "but your own hands, I fear, have not the strength to pull it down. Love you I never did, and you knew it from the beginning; love you I never can. That is a simple impossibility. But true to you as steel to the magnet in all the externals of my life, I have been and shall continue to be, even to the end of this unhappy union. As a virtuous woman, I could be nothing less. The outrage I have suffered this day from your hands, is irreparable. I never imagined it would come to this. I did not dream that it was in you to charge upon your wife the meditation of a crime the deepest it is possible for a woman to commit. That you were weakly jealous, I saw; and I came here in cheerful acquiescence to your whim, in order to help you to get right. But this very act of cheerful acquiescence was made the ground of a charge that shocked my being to the inmost and changed me towards you irrevocably."
The stern angry aspect of Mr. Dexter was all gone. It seemed as if emotion had suddenly exhausted itself.
"We had better go home to-morrow." He spoke in a subdued voice. "Neither of us can find enjoyment here."
"I shall not be ready to morrow, nor the next day either," was the out-spoken reply. "To go thus hurriedly, after your humiliating exhibition of distrust, would only be to give free rein to the tongue of scandal; and that I wish to avoid."