Chalender did not turn his head; but the amorous curve of his lips was fixed in a mask of love—inane, and petrified. Patty waited for RoBards to speak. But he did not know what to say, or to think. And he could not move. CHAPTER XIII If Chalender had only risen in self-defence or reached for a weapon or spoken a word, whether of bravado or cowardice, it would have been easy for RoBards to rush him. If his lip had merely quirked with that flippant smile of his at life, it would have been a rapture to throttle him. But his lip was still pathetic with an arrested kiss, and in his eyes was the pain of desire. He did not know that RoBards was looking at him. The animal instinct to destroy the man who had won his wife’s caress was checked by an instinct equally animal: the disability to attack the helpless and unresisting. First wrath had thrust RoBards forward. But his feet grew leaden upon the floor, as a multitude of impulses and instincts flung out of his soul and crowded about his will, restraining it like a mob of peacemakers, a sheriff’s posse of deputies. He had come from thoughts of piety before the meaning of his home, and his heart was devout. His eyes had just left off embracing with a mighty tenderness the graves of his two little children. The bare imaginations of their mother’s infidelity and its punishment were like sacrilegious rioters abusing the calm church within him. In his revolt, he could have called his eyes liars for presenting his wife to him in another man’s arms, and before he could see through the haze that clouded his vision, she was standing erect and staring at him with a dignity that defied either his suspicions or his revenge. He could have killed Patty for her own recklessness with her honor, which was his now. He understood in a wild flash of thought-lightning why the husband of “the pretty hot-corn girl” must have struck her dead. Chalender had not moved, did not suspect. He was wounded; his fever was high. He might not live. Perhaps he had been in a delirium. Perhaps Patty had been merely trying to quiet him. But she had been saying, “How wicked we are!” as if cheaply absolving herself of sin by confession. Suppose RoBards charged her with disloyalty and she denied it. What proof had he? He was the only witness. He could not divorce her for merely kissing a wounded visitor. Divorce! How loathsome! Nobody had yet forgotten old Aaron Burr’s brief marriage to old Betty Jumel or the recent noisome lawsuit that followed, in which Burr flattered her with four corespondents to her one for him. As a lawyer RoBards had many divorce trials brought to him and he abominated them. He had never had a nightmare so vile as the thought that he might have to choose between clamorous divorce and smothered disgrace.