I could no
longer be of service to him, I have never known. Possibly habit explains
all. He was accustomed to my presence and so was she; so accustomed they
hardly noticed it, as happened one night, when after a little attempt
at conversation, he threw down the book he had caught up and, addressing
her by name, said without a glance my way, and quite as if he were alone
with her:

"'Arabella, there is something I ought to tell you. I have tried to
find the courage to do so many times before now but have always failed.
Tonight I must.' And then he made his great disclosure,--how, unknown
to, his friends and the world, he was a widower when he married her, and
the father of a living child.

"With some women this might have passed with a measure of regret, and
some possible contempt for his silence, but not so with her. She rose
to her feet--I can see her yet--and for a moment stood facing him in the
still, overpowering manner of one who feels the icy pang of hate enter
where love has been. Never was moment more charged. I could not breathe
while it lasted; and when at last she spoke, it was with an impetuosity
of concentrated passion, hardly less dreadful than her silence had been.

"'You a father! A father already!' she cried, all her sweetness
swallowed up in ungovernable wrath. 'You whom I expected to make so
happy with a child? I curse you and your brat. I--'

"He strove to placate her, to explain. But rage has no ears, and before
I realized my own position, the scene became openly tempestuous. That
her child should be second to another woman's seemed to awaken demon
instincts within her. When he ventured to hint that his little girl
needed a mother's care, her irony bit like corroding acid. He became
speechless before it and had not a protest to raise when she declared
that the secret he had kept so long and so successfully he must continue
to keep to his dying day. That the child he had failed to own in his
first wife's lifetime should remain disowned in hers, and if possible be
forgotten. She should never give the girl a thought nor acknowledge her
in any way.

"She was Fury embodied; but the fury was of that grand order which
allures rather than repels. As I felt myself succumbing to its
fascination and beheld how he was weakening under it even more
perceptibly than myself, I started from my chair, and sought to glide
away before I should hear him utter a fatal acquiescence.

"But the movement I made unfor