"How dare you come here?" he exclaimed, in a low, angry voice. "How dare you come here to disgrace and annoy me? How came you away from-- from your lodging that I got for you?" "I came away--I want my child!" was the only reply. "There! hush! Don't speak so loud!" said Richard, in an angry whisper, as he glanced uneasily at the door, and stepping to it, slipped into its socket a little brass bolt. "Did I not tell you never to come here? and did you not promise?" "Yes, yes!" was the hoarse answer; "but I want, I will have, our little one. I have been to the man who had it--I found him out; but he would not give it to me. You have told him not. I could not rest for thinking about it. I want my child, and then we will go far away together." "Go and seek it where it has gone," said Richard, brutally, almost beside himself with suppressed rage;--"it is dead!" "It is a lie--a lie!" cried the woman, excitedly, her pale face flushing with anger. "That man told me the same; but he is in your pay, and you have hidden it from me." She clung to him now fiercely, clutching the ostentatiously-displayed smoothly-plaited shirt-front, and turning it into a crumpled rag. "Hush! hush! For God's sake, be still!" he exclaimed. "They will hear you in the outer office. I have not got the child; it died months ago." "It is a lie!" exclaimed the woman, more angrily. "You drove me mad once with your ill-treatment, but you shall not do it again." Then, raising her voice--"I will have my child!" As Richard Pellet's face turned of a ghastly muddy hue, he glanced again and again at the door, his hands trembling with the cowardly rage that, under different circumstances, might have made the life of the woman before him--his wife--not worth a moment's purchase. The coarse, heavy, insolent smile was gone; for he was attacked in his weakest point, and already in imagination he could see the side looks and laughter of his clerks, and hear the sneering innuendoes of fellow-men of his own stamp when there was a public _expose_, and Richard Pellet, the wealthy banker, who for the sake of money had kept his weak insane wife in obscurity for years, that he might commit bigamy for the fortune of the Widow Clayton, was arraigned for his offence against his country's laws, and the story of his wife's wrongs came forth. What was he to do? He must get her away quietly--by subterfuge--he could lead her in one way he knew, and she would not believe the truth.