"So do I;—though he might smoke less. However, we're none of us perfect.... Well!—I'm sorry to say the story is true. He fell out with Marianne—his wife is Marianne—the day after he arrived at home, although she had received him cordially enough on his arrival. She was at her mother's when he arrived, but came back to dinner. In the course of the evening they quarrelled, but I gathered from his letter that he thought it would blow over. Next morning they were civil to one another, but short of reconciliation. She went out in the morning, and in the afternoon he went away to a club-dinner. When he came back, quite late, he found a note from her, saying that she had gone away again to her mother's, and had taken her children with her."
"Good God!" The Rector's voice is a shocked undertone. "Was that Bob, and the two little girls...? Oh yes!—he told me a good deal of his family."
"Not Bob; he's at school. The others are her own children; he isn't."
"I never was more shocked in my life.... Yes!—Joanikin. You'd better get down and walk a bit. There we are, all alive and kicking!" Joan is deposited on the ground, her legs in evidence. "But do tell me!—'took away her children with her'! She can't, legally."
"She has done it illegally, I presume." Judith is very equable over this point. "She has done it actually, anyhow!"
"What an extraordinary thing!" The Rector cannot get over it.
"Well!—it's true! He came back from his club, poor man, to find his house empty and his children gone. And no explanation but the note. He roused up the servants that were left, a cook named Steptoe and the housemaid, who said their mistress and the nurse and children had packed a few things and gone away in a cab with a friend, about an hour after he left."
"It seems almost incredible—at first." He has to walk on a little way, fanning himself with his bandana handkerchief, before he can settle down from his amazement, and try for enlightening details. At last he says: "And then he wrote to you—when? Next day?"
"He left us, you remember, on Tuesday. His letter is dated Tuesday. The Tuesday after. Just a week."
"Would you object to my seeing it?"