"You don't know, Joan, Dick," he replied."She'd never consent to a separation, even for a short time.""Try her.She's a sensible woman--a deuced sight more than you are.You don't understand women, Ned.That's what's the matter with you."It required all of Blandford's fond memories of his wife's conservative habits, Puritan practicality, religious domesticity, and strong family attachments, to withstand Demorest's dogmatic convictions.He smiled, however, with a certain complacency, as he also recalled the previous autumn when the first news of the California gold discovery had penetrated North Liberty, and he had expressed to her his belief that it would offer an outlet to Demorest's adventurous energy.She had received it with ill-disguised satisfaction, and the remark that if this exodus of Mammon cleared the community of the godless and unregenerate it would only be another proof of God's mysterious providence.
With the tumultuous wind at their backs it was not long before the buggy rattled once more over the cobble-stones of the town.Under the direction of his friend, Demorest, who still retained possession of the reins, drove briskly down a side street of more pretentious dwellings, where Blandford lived.One or two wayfarers looked up.
"Not so fast, Dick."
"Why? I want to bring you up to your door in style.""Yes--but--it's Sunday.That's my house, the corner one."They had stopped before a square, two-storied brick house, with an equally square wooden porch supported by two plain, rigid wooden columns, and a hollow sweep of dull concavity above the door, evidently of the same architectural order as the church.There was no corner or projection to break the force of the wind that swept its smooth glacial surface; there was no indication of light or warmth behind its six closed windows.
"There seems to be nobody at home," said Demorest, briefly."Come along with me to the hotel.""Joan sits in the back parlor, Sundays," explained the husband.
"Shall I drive round to the barn and leave the horse and buggy there while you go in?" continued Demorest, good-humoredly, pointing to the stable gate at the side.
"No, thank you," returned Blandford, "it's locked, and I'll have to open it from the other side after I go in.The horse will stand until then.I think I'll have to say good-night, now," he added, with a sudden half-ashamed consciousness of the forbidding aspect of the house, and his own inhospitality."I'm sorry I can't ask you in--but you understand why.""All right," returned Demorest, stoutly, turning up his coat-collar, and unfurling his umbrella."The hotel is only four blocks away--you'll find me there to-morrow morning if you call.But mind you tell your wife just what I told you--and no meandering of your own--you hear! She'll strike out some idea with her woman's wits, you bet.Good-night, old man! He reached out his hand, pressed Blandford's strongly and potentially, and strode down the street.
Blandford hitched his steaming horse to a sleet-covered horse block with a quick sigh of impatient sympathy over the animal and himself, and after fumbling in his pocket for a latchkey, opened the front door.A vista of well-ordered obscurity with shadowy trestle-like objects against the walls, and an odor of chill decorum, as if of a damp but respectable funeral, greeted him on entering.A faint light, like a cold dawn, broke through the glass pane of a door leading to the kitchen.Blandford paused in the mid-darkness and hesitated.Should he first go to his wife in the back parlor, or pass silently through the kitchen, open the back gate, and mercifully bestow his sweating beast in the stable? With the reflection that an immediate conjugal greeting, while his horse was still exposed to the fury of the blast in the street, would necessarily be curtailed and limited, he compromised by quickly passing through the kitchen into the stable yard, opening the gate, and driving horse and vehicle under the shed to await later and more thorough ministration.As he entered the back door, a faint hope that his wife might have heard him and would be waiting for him in the hall for an instant thrilled him; but he remembered it was Sunday, and that she was probably engaged in some devotional reading or exercise.He hesitatingly opened the back-parlor door with a consciousness of committing some unreasonable trespass, and entered.
She was there, sitting quietly before a large, round, shining centre-table, whose sterile emptiness was relieved only by a shaded lamp and a large black and gilt open volume.A single picture on the opposite wall--the portrait of an elderly gentleman stiffened over a corresponding volume, which he held in invincible mortmain in his rigid hand, and apparently defied posterity to take from him--seemed to offer a not uncongenial companionship.Yet the greenish light of the shade fell upon a young and pretty face, despite the color it extracted from it, and the hand that supported her low white forehead over which her full hair was simply parted, like a brown curtain, was slim and gentle-womanly.In spite of her plain lustreless silk dress, in spite of the formal frame of sombre heavy horsehair and mahogany furniture that seemed to set her off, she diffused an atmosphere of cleanly grace and prim refinement through the apartment.The priestess of this ascetic temple, the femininity of her closely covered arms, her pink ears, and a little serviceable morocco house-shoe that was visible lower down, resting on the carved lion's paw that upheld the centre-table, appeared to be only the more accented.And the precisely rounded but softly heaving bosom, that was pressed upon the edges of the open book of sermons before her, seemed to assert itself triumphantly over the rigors of the volume.
