Chapter XXVI - Page 2

shouldn't I? What has he done that is worse than what I've done? What has he done that's as bad? For, after all, you were little or nothing to him, when you were everything to me. I knew you as he didn't know you. I had lived in one house with you, watched you, studied you, tried you, put you to tests that you never knew anything about, and had seen you come through them successfully. I had seen how you bore misfortune; I had seen how you carried yourself in difficult situations; I had seen the skill with which you ruled my house, and the wisdom with which you were more than a mother to my child; I had seen you combine with all that is most womanly the patience and fortitude of a man; and it wasn't enough for me--it wasn't enough for me!"

He threw himself back into his seat, with a desperate flinging out of the hands, letting his arms drop heavily over the sides of his chair till his fingers touched the floor.

"My God! My God!" he groaned, ironically. "It wasn't enough for me! I doubted her. I doubted her on the first idle word that came my way. I did more than doubt her. I haled her into my court, and tried her, and condemned her, and, as nearly as might be, put her to death. I, with my ten hundred thousand sins--all of them as black as Erebus--found her not pure enough for me! It ought to make one die of laughter. Diane," he went on, in another tone--a tone of ghastly jocularity--"didn't it amuse you, knowing yourself to be what you are--knowing what you had done for Mrs. Eveleth--knowing the things Bienville has just said of you--didn't it amuse you to see me sitting in judgment on you?"

"It doesn't amuse me to see you sitting in judgment on yourself."

"Doesn't it? I should think it would. It seems to me that if I saw a man who had done me so much harm visited with such awful justice as I'm getting now, it would make up to me for nearly everything I ever had to suffer."

"In my case it only adds to it. I wish you wouldn't say these things. If you ever did me wrong, I always knew it was--by mistake."

"Oh, Lord! Oh, Lord!" He laughed outright, getting up from his chair and dragging himself heavily across the room, where, with his hands in his pockets and his back against the bookshelves, he stood facing her. "What do you think of Bienville's attitude toward Marion Grimston?" he asked, with an inflection that would have sounded casual if it had not been for all that lay behind.

"I can understand it; but I think he was wrong."

"You think he ought to allow her to marry him?"

"Weighing one thing with another--yes."

"Would you marry a man who had shown himself such a hound?"

"It would depend."

"On what?"

"Oh, on a good many things."

"Such