Page:The Breath of Scandal (1922).djvu/268

 For, if discovered, he expected to be divorced; he reckoned that, as the result of the scandal, he might be forced out of Tri-Lake, but he was wholly confident of his ability to obtain another position and make money. His wife certainly would claim alimony, and he always expected to pay it in sums sufficient to enable her and Marjorie to maintain the home; for he was not a man to consider escape from an obligation which he had assumed and never did he dream of repudiating his duty of supporting his wife and child.

He had imagined correspondence—formal, undoubtedly, but yet correspondence—passing between himself and his wife; he had fancied, even if the very worst came, that Marjorie would visit him sometimes, as he had fancied, when part of the worst actually had happened and she knew, that she would continue under his roof. How fatuous he had been! How he had hurt her more than ever he had imagined and far more than he had hurt himself. For, though he soon stilled his terrors that she had made away with herself, he never afterwards mistook the disaster to her from the blow he had struck her.

How he had undone, by that one blow, all that previously he had done for her since she was a pink baby just born; for from that moment when the nurse gave his child to his arms—indeed, from a time as much earlier as when he first learned from his wife that he was to have a child and he reckoned the even chances that it would be a daughter—he had adopted one consistent, unvarying attitude toward her, determining by all his powers to hold from her the unpleasant, the arduous, the perplexing and the ugly in life; to bring her to womanhood healthy, happy, graceful, cultured, honored, envied and all that a girl of any one's might