He had taken his glasses off while he made this assertion. Now he put them on again.
“If you give him up I’ll divide with the boy and be rich enough still to hand over to my wife all she wants to spend.”
She turned her face away from him and leaned her head once more upon her hands. He heard her softly murmuring under her breath, with an absent look on her face, accompanied by a still more incomprehensible smile.
She seemed to have forgotten him entirely, and he caught his breath when she turned about abruptly and said:
“My goodness, how Dan will hate being poor! He will have to sell all his stickpins and his motor cars and all the things he has given me. It will be quite a little to start on, but he will hate it, he is so very smart.”
“Why, you don’t mean to say—” Ruggles gasped.
And with a charming smile as she rose to put their conversation at an end, she said:
“Why, you don’t mean to say that you thought I _wouldn’t stand by him_?” She seemed, as she put her hands upon her hips with something of a defiant look at the older man, as though she just then stood by her pauperized lover.
“I thought you cared some for the boy,” Ruggles said.
“You want to ruin him to show it, do you?”
As though he thought the subject dismissed he walked heavily toward the door.
“You know how it stands. I have nothing more to say.” He knew that he had signally failed, and as a sudden resentment rose in him he exclaimed, almost brutally:
“I am darned glad the old man is dead; I am glad his mother’s dead, and I am glad I have got no son.”
The next moment she was at his side, and he felt that she clung to his arm. Her sensitive, beautiful face, all drawn with emotion, was raised to his.
“Oh, you’ll kill me—you’ll kill me! Just look how very ill I am; you are making me crazy. I just worship him.”
“Give him up, then,” said Ruggles steadily.
She faltered: “I can’t—I can’t—it won’t be for long”—with a terrible pathos in her voice. “You don’t know how different I can be: you don’t know what a new life we were going to lead.”
Stammering, and with intense meaning, Ruggles, looking down at her, said: “My dear child—my dear child!”
In his few words something perhaps made her see in a flash her past and what the question really was. She dropped Ruggles’ arm. She stood for a moment with her arms folded across her breast, her head bent down, and the man at the door waited, feeling that Dan’s whole life was in the balance of the moment. When she spoke again her voice was hard and entirely devoid of the lovely appealing quality which brought her so much admiration from the public.