She ran to him and plucked the child from him, and then went back as far as she could from him in the room, crying, “Give me the child!” and facing him with the look he knew. Her eyes were dilated, and her visage white with the transport that had whirled her far beyond the reach of reason. The frail structure of his good resolutions dropped to ruin at the sight, but he mechanically rose and advanced upon her till she forbade him with a muffled shriek of “Don't touch me! So!” she went on, gasping and catching her breath, “it was you! I might have known it! I might have guessed it from the first! You! Was that the reason why you didn't care to have me hurry home this summer? Was that—was that—” She choked, and convulsively pressed her face into the neck of the child, which began to cry.
Bartley closed the doors, and then, with his hands in his pockets, confronted her with a smile of wicked coolness. “Will you be good enough to tell me what you're talking about?”
“Do you pretend that you don't know? I met a woman at the bottom of the street just now. Do you know who?”
“No; but it's very dramatic. Go on!”
“It was Hannah Morrison! She reeled against me; and when I—such a fool as I was!—pitied her, because I was on my way home to you, and was thinking about you and loving you, and was so happy in it, and asked her how she came to that, she struck me, and told me to—to—ask my—husband!”
The transport broke in tears; the denunciation had turned to entreaty in everything but words; but Bartley had hardened his heart now past all entreaty. The idiotic penitent that he had been a few moments ago, the soft, well-meaning dolt, was so far from him now as to be scarce within the reach of his contempt. He was going to have this thing over once for all; he would have no mercy upon himself or upon her; the Devil was in him, and uppermost in him, and the Devil is fierce and proud, and knows how to make many base emotions feel like a just self-respect. “And did you believe a woman like that?” he sneered.
“Do I believe a man like this?” she demanded, with a dying flash of her fury. “You—you don't dare to deny it.”
“Oh, no, I don't deny it. For one reason, it would be of no use. For all practical purposes, I admit it. What then?”
“What then?” she asked, bewildered. “Bartley; You don't mean it!”
“Yes, I do. I mean it. I don't deny it. What then? What are you going to do about it?” She gazed at him in incredulous horror. “Come! I mean what I say. What will you do?”