"Oh, Margaret, don't go into heroics!" he cried. "Listen to reason! Men can't be bound down by a woman's code of morals. They never have been, and they never will be. And women might as well understand it." "Then marriage is a lie and a cheat!" she cried with vehemence. "You take the same vows that we do, and you take them saying to yourselves that you will keep them only so long as you chose, and will break them at your will!... But we--poor fools! we speak those vows with bated breath and souls bared before God, and mean to keep them--strive to keep them even when--" "Is it such a struggle?" he asked, sneeringly. "--even when faith in you is dead or dying. Yes. It is a struggle then. 'Love, honor, and obey!' Bah!" "Well," he said, stung by her scorn, but carrying it off insolently, "in the words of the illustrious Mr. Tweed, 'What are you going to do about it?'" Had he been man enough--perhaps even had he been old enough--he would have thought of the danger to her in all this tumult of feeling and calmed her by a candid meeting of the question she had forced upon him. But he maddened her with his flippant manner and contemptuous words. And a change was going on in him too. Under his light demeanor his anger was rising. There was bad blood in Victor De Jarnette--false, cowardly blood--and it was beginning to assert itself. "I am going to do this," she said, in a low, concentrated tone. "I demand to know what this woman is to you. I have a right to know." "And know you shall," he answered, meeting her gaze with defiant eyes, in which every evil passion had burst into flame. "Since I am to be badgered and run to earth in my own home, know that she is a woman I love--and shall love. One that I shall go to when--and where--and as I please. The De Jarnettes are not ruled by their women!" "Then choose between us," she said, with whitening lips, "for I swear to you by the living God I will be all or nothing to the man that calls me wife!" They stood facing each other,--her features white and drawn, his inflamed with passion. Then, with a sudden revulsion of feeling, a frightened sense of her own helplessness, perhaps, or possibly a surging back of her old love--for women are strange beings--she came closer to him and stretched out her hands. "Victor! Oh, Victor!" He thrust her aside and went out. The door clanged behind him, waking echoes in the silent house, and Margaret, suddenly strengthless, dropped in a heap on the floor, her face buried in the couch. She sat there long with hopeless eyes staring into the blackness of the morrow, saying now and then brokenly, "Father!... Father!" * * * * *