it company for the saints and angels, you have been
prostituting yourself to this blusterer, this . . ."

"That is a lie," I said, stepping up to him in the middle of the floor.
"It's true that I am married to you, but _he_ is my real husband and you
. . . you are nothing to me at all."

My husband stood for a moment with his mouth agape. Then he began to
laugh--loudly, derisively, mockingly.

"Nothing to you, am I? You don't mind bearing my name, though, and when
your time comes you'll expect it to cover your disgrace."

His face had become shockingly distorted. He was quivering with fury.

"That's not the worst, either," he cried. "It's not enough that you
should tell me to my face that somebody else is your real husband, but
you must shunt your spurious offspring into my house. Isn't that what it
all comes to . . . all this damnable fuss of your father's . . . that
you are going to palm off on me and my name and family your own and this
man's . . . bastard?"

And with the last word, in the drunkenness of his rage, he lifted his
arm and struck me with the back of his hand across the cheek.

The physical shock was fearful, but the moral infamy was a hundred-fold
worse. I can truly say that not alone for myself did I suffer. When my
mind, still going at lightning speed, thought of Martin, who loved me so
tenderly, I felt crushed by my husband's blow to the lowest depths of
shame.

I must have screamed, though I did not know it, for at the next moment
Price was in the room and I saw that the housekeeper (drawn perhaps, as
before, by my husband's loud voice) was on the landing outside the door.
But even that did not serve to restrain him.

"No matter," he said. "After what has passed you may not enjoy
to-morrow's ceremony. But you shall go through it! By heaven, you shall!
And when it is over, I shall have something to say to your father."

And with that he swung out of the room and went lunging down the stairs.

I was still standing in the middle of the floor, with the blow from my
husband's hand tingling on my cheek, when Price, after clashing the door
in the face of the housekeeper, said, with her black eyes ablaze:

"Well, if ever I wanted to be a man before to-day!"

News of the scene went like wildfire through the house, and Alma's
mother came to comfort me. In her crude and blundering way she told me
of a similar insult she had suffered at the hands of the "bad Lord Raa,"
and how it had been the real