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The muscles of Mr. Caruthers’s face were moving, and beyond his control; but Van Bibber did not see this, for he was looking intently out of the window, over the roofs of the city.

“She had every chance when she married me that a woman ever had,” continued the older man. “It only depended on herself. I didn’t try to make a housewife of her or a drudge. She had all the healthy excitement and all the money she wanted, and she had a home here ready for her whenever she was tired of travelling about and wished to settle down. And I was–and a husband that loved her as–she had everything–everything that a man’s whole thought and love and money could bring to her. And you know what she did.”

He looked at Van Bibber, but Van Bibber’s eyes were still turned towards the open window and the night.

“And after the divorce–and she was free to go where she pleased, and to live as she pleased and with whom she pleased, without bringing disgrace on a husband who honestly loved her–I swore to my God that I would never see her nor her child again. And I never saw her again, not even when she died. I loved the mother, and she deceived me and disgraced me and broke my heart, and I only wish she had killed me; and I was beginning to love her child, and I vowed she should not live to trick me too. I had suffered as no man I know had suffered; in a way a boy like you cannot understand, and that no one can understand who has not gone to hell and been forced to live after it. And was I to go through that again? Was I to love and care for and worship this child, and have her grow up with all her mother’s vanity and animal nature, and have her turn on me some day and show me that what is bred in the bone must tell, and that I was a fool again–a pitiful fond fool? I could not trust her. I can never trust any woman or child again, and least of all that woman’s child. She is as dead to me as though she were buried with her mother, and it is nothing to me what she is or what her life is. I know in time what it will be. She has begun earlier than I had supposed, that is all; but she is nothing to me.” The man stopped and turned his back to Van Bibber, and hid his head in his hands, with his elbows on the mantelpiece. “I care too much,” he said. “I cannot let it mean anything to me; when I do care, it means so much more to me than to other men. They may pretend to laugh and to forget and to outgrow it, but it is not so with me. It means too much.” He took a quick stride towards one of the arm-chairs, and threw himself into it. “Why, man,” he cried, “I loved that child’s mother to the day of her death. I loved that woman then, and, God help me! I love that woman still.”

He covered his face with his hands, and sat leaning forward and breathing heavily as he rocked himself to and fro. Van Bibber still stood looking gravely out at the lights that picketed the black surface of the city. He was to all appearances as unmoved by the outburst of feeling into which the older man had been surprised as though it had been something in a play. There was an unbroken silence for a moment, and then it was Van Bibber who was the first to speak.