hours. Meantime"--he glanced up--"I suppose you won't smoke?
Have you had any breakfast?"

"Then you mean to desert her?" Jack said.

Mordaunt's face remained immovable. He began to smoke in dead silence.

Jack's teeth clenched. "I am going to have an answer," he said.

"Very well." Coldly the words fell; there was something merciless in
their very utterance. "Then I will answer you; but it is my last word
upon the subject. My wife followed her own choice in leaving me, and it
is my intention to abide by her decision. If you call that desertion--"

"I do," Jack broke in passionately. "It is desertion, nothing less. She
left you--oh, I know all about it--she left you because you literally
scared her away. You terrified her into going; there was nothing else for
her to do. She had done nothing wrong. But you--you dared to suspect her
of Heaven knows what. You dared to think that Chris--my Chris--was
capable of playing you false, you who were the only man on earth I
thought good enough for her. And do you know what you have done? You have
broken her heart!" He took the portrait from the mantelpiece and thrust
it in front of the man at the table. "That," he said, and suddenly his
voice was quivering, "that was the child you married. I gave her into
your care willingly, though, God knows, I worshipped her. No, you didn't
cut me out. I was never in the running. I never so much as made love to
her. I always knew she was not for me. When she accepted you, I thought
it was the best thing that could possibly happen. I felt she would be
safe with you. You were the one fellow I would have chosen to guard her.
And she needed guarding. She was as innocent and as inexperienced as a
baby. She didn't know the world and its beastly ways. I thought you were
to be trusted to keep her out of the mud; I could have sworn you were.
But you withdrew your protection just when she needed it most. You
practically turned her out, cut her adrift. She might have gone straight
to the bad for all you cared. And now, like the damned blackguard that
you are, you are going to clear out and leave her to break her heart!"

Fiercely the words rushed out. Jack, the placid, the kindly, the
careless, was for the moment electrified by a tornado of feeling that
swept him far beyond the bounds of his customary easy _bonhomie_. He
towered over the man in the chair as if at the first movement he would
fell him to the ground.

But Mordaunt remained quite motion