“I won’t trouble you to ring,” he said; “and I will beg your pardon for having allowed my temper to get the better of me. At the same time it ought to be remembered, I think, in my favor, that I have had some provocation.”
“I don’t agree with you,” Mrs. Presty answered. She was deaf to any appeal for mercy from Herbert Linley. “As to provocation,” she added, returning to her chair without asking him to be seated, “when you apply that word to yourself, you insult my daughter and me. You provoked? Oh, heavens!”
“You wouldn’t say that,” he urged, speaking with marked restraint of tone and manner, “if you knew what I have had to endure—”
Mrs. Presty suddenly looked toward the door. “Wait a minute,” she said; “I think I hear somebody coming in.”
In the silence that followed, footsteps were audible outside—not approaching the door, however, but retiring from it. Mrs. Presty had apparently been mistaken. “Yes?” she said resignedly, permitting Herbert to proceed.
He really had something to say for himself, and he said it with sufficient moderation. That he had been guilty of serious offenses he made no attempt to deny; but he pleaded that he had not escaped without justly suffering for what he had done. He had been entirely in the wrong when he threatened to take the child away from her mother by force of law; but had he not been punished when his wife obtained her Divorce, and separated him from his little daughter as well as from herself? (No: Mrs. Presty failed to see it; if anybody had suffered by the Divorce, the victim was her injured daughter.) Still patient, Herbert did not deny the injury; he only submitted once more that he had suffered his punishment. Whether his life with Sydney Westerfield had or had not been a happy one, he must decline to say; he would only declare that it had come to an end. She had left him. Yes! she had left him forever. He had no wish to persuade her to return to their guilty life; they were both penitent, they were both ashamed of it. But she had gone away without the provision which he was bound in honor to offer to her.
“She is friendless; she may be in a state of poverty that I tremble to think of,” Herbert declared. “Is there nothing to plead for me in such anxiety as I am suffering now?” Mrs. Presty stopped him there; she had heard enough of Sydney already.
“I see nothing to be gained,” she said, “by dwelling on the past; and I should be glad to know why you have come to this place to-night.”
“I have come to see Kitty.”
“Quite out of the question.”