“Oh, telegraph!” cried Clara. “Telegraph them instantly that she never dreamt of leaving him! Abandonment! Oh, if they only knew how she had been slaving her lingers off for the last two years to keep a home for him to come back to, they'd give her the divorce!”
Atherton smiled and turned to Halleck: “Do you know what their law is, now? It was changed two years ago.”
“Yes,” said Halleck, replying to the question Atherton had asked and the subtler question he had looked, “I have read up the whole subject since I came home. The divorce is granted only upon proof, even when the defendant fails to appear, and if this were to go against us,”—he instinctively identified himself with Marcia's cause,—“we can have the default set aside, and a new trial granted, for cause shown.”
The women listened in awe of the legal phrases; but when Atherton rose, and asked, “Is your carriage here?” his wife sprang to her feet.
“Why, where are you going?” she demanded, anxiously.
“Not to Indiana, immediately,” answered her husband. “We're first going to Clover Street, to see Squire Gaylord and Mrs. Hubbard. Better let me take the paper, dear,” he said, softly withdrawing it from her hands.
“Oh, it's a cruel, cruel law!” she moaned, deprived of this moral support. “To suppose that such a notice as this is sufficient! Women couldn't have made such a law.”
“No, women only profit by such laws after they're made: they work both ways. But it's not such a bad law, as divorce laws go. We do worse, now, in some New England States.”
They found the Squire alone in the parlor, and, with a few words of explanation, Atherton put the paper in his hands, and he read the notice in emotionless quiet. Then he took off his spectacles, and shut them in their case, which he put back into his waistcoat pocket. “This is all right,” he said. He cleared his throat, and, lifting the fierce glimmer of his eyes to Atherton's, he asked, drily, “What is the law, at present?”
Atherton briefly recapitulated the points as he had them from Halleck.