"Oh, now, brother Burnham," the clergyman had said, good naturedly, after a brief, keen argument on both sides: "Don't you really draw the lines too closely? You are not reasonable. Do you think he is, Mrs. Burnham?"--the appeal was to Erskine's wife--"You see you have made no allowance for accidents, or misunderstandings of any sort. What would you have a poor woman do who was caught as an acquaintance of mine was, a year or so ago? She married a divorced man without having the remotest idea that he had ever been married before, and did not discover it until six months afterward. Where would those sweeping assertions you have been making place her?"
"I was not speaking, of course, of people who had been the victims of cruel deception; certainly if I believed in divorce, I should consider that the woman you mention had sufficient cause."
"For just that reason. At least it must be terrible for a woman to spend her life with a man whose word she cannot trust. I should think it would be just ground for separation if anything is."
His mother recalled not only the energy of his tones, but the suddenness with which his wife introduced another topic.
Then there flashed upon her the memory of the clergyman's next remark, addressed to her:--
"Mrs. Burnham, is your daughter always as pale as she is to-day, or has our near approach to a quarrel, just now, frightened her?" Whereupon the color had flamed into Irene's face until her very forehead was flushed; and Erskine, looking at her, had said gayly:--
"My wife always blushes when she is the subject of conversation." What terrible significance attached to all these trifles now!
But, worse than all else, the woman had deserted and disowned her own child! So impossibly preposterous did this seem to Erskine Burnham's mother, that although she had detained her guest until a late hour, and questioned and cross-questioned, and insisted upon yet more proof, and been shown that there was not a possibility of error, she still shrank from it as something that could not be.
"Can a mother forget her child?" It was the question of inspiration, designed to show the almost impossibility of such a thing; yet inspiration had answered, "Yes, she may!" and here, under their own roof, was a living proof of its truth.