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Bailey’s hands fell slack. He suddenly remembered something. He brushed his hand over his brow as if to clear his vision:

“Jim, Jim, I–good God!–how could you do such a thing?” He was helpless as a boy, in face of this hideous complication.

Rivers pushed his advantage. He developed a species of swagger:

“Never mind about that. It’s done. Now what are you going to do? Can you fix up such a thing as that?” Bailey was still silent. “It simply means that I’m her husband from this time on. Sit down, Blanche–I’m going to put up the team, but to-morrow morning we go. We couldn’t make it now, anyway,” he added. “There’s nothing for it but to stay here all night.”

Bailey stood aside to let him go out, then went to the stove and mechanically stirred it up and put some water heating. This finished, he sat down and leaned his head in his hands in confused thought.

To his clear sense his partner’s act seemed monstrous. He had been brought up to respect the marriage bond, and to protect and honor women. The illicit was impossible to his candid soul. All the men he had associated with had been respecters of marriage, though some of them were obscene–thoughtlessly, he always believed–and now Jim, his chum, had come between a man and his wife! With Estelle in his mind as the type of purity, he could not understand how a wife could be the faithless creature Blanche Burke seemed. Her weakness opened a new world to him. He could not trust himself to speak to her.

The bubbling of the kettle aroused him, and he rose and went about getting supper. After a few moments he felt able to ask, with formal politeness:

“Won’t you lay off your things, Mrs. Burke?”

She made no reply, but sat like an old gypsy, crouched low, with brooding face. She, too, was wordless. She had made the curious mistake of looking to Bailey for justification. She had felt that he would understand and pity her, and his accusing eyes hurt her sorely. “If I could only speak? If I could only find words to tell him my thought, he would at least not despise me,” she thought. Her face turned toward him piteously, but she dared not lift her eyes to his. He typified the world to her, and, furthermore, he was kindly and just; and yet he was about to condemn her because she could not make him understand.

Trained to laugh when she should weep, how could she plead overmastering desire, the pressure of loneliness and poverty, and, last of all, the power of a man who stood, in her fancy, among the most brilliant of her world. She felt herself in the grasp of forces as vast, as impersonal, and as illimitable as the wind and the sky, but, reduced to words, her poor plea for mercy would have been, “I could not help it.”

Her maternity, which should have been her glory and her pride, was at this hour an insupportable shame. She had experienced her moments of emotional exaltation wherein she was lifted above self-abasement, but now she crouched in the lowest depths of self-suspicion. The rising storm seemed the approach of the remorseless judgment-day, the howl of the wind, the voice of devils, exulting in her fall.

She did not trouble herself about her husband. At times she flamed out in anger against his weakness, his business failures, his boyish gullibility. Sometimes she pitied him, sometimes she hated him.

She watched Bailey furtively. The firm lines of his face, his sturdy figure, and his frank, brusque manner were as familiar to her as the face of Rivers, and almost as dear–but she could not speak!

At last she gave up all thought of speaking, and drew her shawl about her with an air of final reserve. She resembled an old crone as she crouched there.

Rivers returned soon and took off his overcoat without looking at Bailey, who bustled about getting the supper, his resolute cheerfulness once more aglow.