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.I’ve got to see about some supper for us.I ain’t had a bite since dinner, and Min’s off gadding somewheres—” She hurried away, mentally washing her hands of the affair.“Women’s got to learn some time what men is,” she soliloquized, “and I guess she ain’t no better than any of the rest of us, that she can’t learn to take her medicine—but I ain’t goin’ to be the one to tell her what kinda fellow she’s tied to.My stunt ’ll be helpin’ her pick up the pieces and make the best of it after she’s told.”She stopped, just inside the dining room, and listened until she heard Kent cross the hall from the office and open the parlor door.“Gee! It’s like a hangin’,” she sighed.“If she wasn’t so plumb innocent—” She started for the door which opened into the parlor from the dining room, strongly tempted to eavesdrop.She did yield so far as to put her ear to the keyhole, but the silence within impressed her strangely, and she retreated to the kitchen and closed the door tightly behind her as the most practical method of bidding Satan begone.The silence in the parlor lasted while Kent, standing with his back against the door, faced Val and meditated swiftly upon the manner of his telling.“Well?” she demanded at last.“I am still waiting to see Manley.I am not quite a child, Mr.Burnett.I know something is the matter, and you—if you have any pity, or any feeling of friendship, you will tell me the truth.Don’t you suppose I know that Arline was—lying to me all the time about Manley? You helped her to lie.So did that other man.I waited until I reached town, where I could do something, and now you must tell me the truth.Manley is badly hurt, or he is dead.Tell me which it is, and take me to him.” She spoke fast, as if she was afraid she might not be able to finish, and, though her voice was even and low, it was also flat and toneless with her effort to seem perfectly calm and self-controlled.Kent looked at her, forgot all about leading up to the truth by easy stages, as he had intended to do, and gave it to her straight.“He ain’t either one,” he said.“He’s drunk!”Val stared at him.“Drunk!” He could see how even her lips shrank from the word.She threw up her head.“That,” she declared icily, “I know to be impossible!”“Oh, do you? Let me tell you that’s never impossible with a man, not when there’s whisky handy.”“Manley is not that sort of a man.When he left me, three years ago, he promised me never to frequent places where liquor is sold.He never had touched liquor; he never was tempted to touch it.But, just to be doubly sure, he promised me, on his honor.He has never broken that promise; I know, because he told me so.” She made the explanation scornfully, as if her pride and her belief in Manley almost forbade the indignity of explaining.“I don’t know why you should come here and insult me,” she added, with a lofty charity for his sin.“I don’t see how it can insult you,” he contended.“You’ve got a different way of looking at things, but that won’t help you to dodge facts.Man’s drunk.I said it, and I mean it.It ain’t the first time, nor the second.He was drunk the day you came, and couldn’t meet the train.That’s why I met you.I ought to ’ve told you, I guess, but I hated to make you feel bad.So I went to work and sobered him up, and sent him over to get married.I’ve always been kinda sorry for that.It was a lowdown trick to play on you, and that’s a fact.You ought to ’ve had a chance to draw outa the game, but I didn’t think about it at the time.Man and I have always been pretty good friends, and I was thinking of his side of the case.I thought he’d straighten up after he got married; he wasn’t such a hard drinker—only he’d go on a toot when he got into town, like lots of men.I didn’t think it had such a strong hold on him.And I knew he thought a lot of you, and if you went back on him it’d hit him pretty hard.Man ain’t a bad fellow, only for that.And he’s liable to do better when he finds out you know about it.A man will do ’most anything for a woman he thinks a lot of.”“Indeed!” Val was sitting now upon the red plush chair.Her face was perfectly colorless, her manner frozen.The word seemed to speak itself, without having any relation whatever to her thoughts and her emotions.Kent waited.It seemed to him that she took it harder than she would have taken the news that Manley was dead.He had no means of gauging the horror of a young woman who has all her life been familiar with such terms as “the demon rum,” and who has been taught that “intemperance is the doorway to perdition”; a young woman whose life has been sheltered jealously from all contact with the ugly things of the world, and who believes that she might better die than marry a drunkard.He watched her unobtrusively.“Anyway, it was worrying over you that made him get off wrong today,” he ventured at last, as a sort of palliative.“They say he was going to start home right in the face of the fire, and when they wouldn’t let him, he headed straight for a saloon and commenced to pour whisky down him.He thought sure you—he thought the fire would—”“I see,” Val interrupted stonily.“For the very doubtful honor of shaking the hand of a politician, he left me alone to face as best I might the possibility of burning alive; and when it seemed likely that the possibility had become a certainty, he must celebrate his bereavement by becoming a beast.Is that what you would have me believe of my husband?”“That’s about the size of it,” Kent admitted reluctantly.“Only I wouldn’t have put it just that way, maybe.”“Indeed! And how would you put it, then?”Kent leaned harder against the door, and looked at her curiously.Women, it seemed to him, were always going to extremes; they were either too soft and meek, or else they were too hard and unmerciful.“How would you put it? I am rather curious to know your point of view.”“Well, I know men better than you do, Mrs.Fleetwood.I know they can do some things that look pretty rotten on the surface, and yet be fairly decent underneath.You don’t know how a habit like that gets a fellow just where he’s weakest.Man ain’t a beast.He’s selfish and careless, and he gives way too easy, but he thinks the world of you.Jim says he cried like a baby when he came into the saloon, and acted like a crazy man.You don’t want to be too hard on him.I’ve an idea this will learn him a lesson.If you take him the right way, Mrs.Fleetwood, the chances are he’ll quit drinking.”Val smiled.Kent thought he had never before seen a smile like that, and hoped he never would see another.There was in it neither mercy nor mirth, but only the hard judgment of a woman who does not understand.“Will you bring him to me here, Mr.Burnett? I do not feel quite equal to invading a saloon and begging him, on my knees, to come—after the conventional manner of drunkards’ wives.But I should like to see him.”Kent stared.“He ain’t in any shape to argue with,” he remonstrated.“You better wait a while.”She rested her chin upon her hands, folded upon the high chair back, and gazed at him with her tawny eyes, that somehow reminded Kent of a lioness in a cage.He thought swiftly that a lioness would have as much mercy as she had in that mood.“Mr
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