“Why did you say you went to him—­that is, what was the special reason?” Mr. Cameron asked, and after a moment’s hesitancy, Katy told him her belief that Genevra was living—­that it was she who made the bridal trousseau for Wilford’s second wife, who nursed his child until it died, giving to it her own name, arraying it for the grave, and then leaving, as she always did, before the father came.

“I never told Wilford,” Katy said.  “I felt as if I would rather he should not know it yet.  Perhaps I was wrong, but if so, I have been terribly punished.”

Mr. Cameron could not look upon the woman who stood before him, so helpless and stricken in her desolation, and believe her wrong in anything.  The guilt lay in another direction, and when as the terrible reality that she was indeed a deserted wife came rushing over Katy, she tottered toward him for help, he stretched his arms out for her, and taking the sinking figure in them, laid it upon the sofa as gently, as kindly as Wilford had ever touched it in his most loving days.

Katy did not faint nor weep.  She was past all that, but her face was like a piece of marble, and her eyes were like those of the hunted fawn when the chase is at its height and escape impossible.

“Wilford would come back if he knew just how it was,” the father said, “but the trouble is where to find him.  He speaks of writing to me, as I presume he will in a day or so, and perhaps it will be as well to wait till then.  What the plague—­who is ringing that bell enough to break the wire?” he added, as a sharp, rapid ring echoed through the house and was answered by Esther.  “It’s my wife,” he continued, as he caught the sound of her voice asking if Mrs. Cameron had returned.  “You stay here while I meet her first alone.  I’ll give it to her for cheating me so long and raising thunder generally!”

Katy tried to protest, but he was halfway down the stairs, and in a moment more was with his wife, who had come around armed and equipped to censure Katy as the cause of Wilford’s disappearance, and to demand of her where she was the night she pretended to spend at No. ——­ Fifth Avenue.  But the lady who came in so haughty and indignant was a very different personage from the lady who, after listening for fifteen minutes to a fearful storm of oaths and reproaches, mingled with startling truths and bitter denunciations against herself and her boy, sank into a chair, pale and trembling, and overwhelmed with the harvest she was reaping.

But her husband was not through with her yet.  He had reserved the bitterest drop for the last, and coming close to her he said: 

“And who think you the woman is—­this Genevra, Wilford’s and your divorced wife?  You were too proud to acknowledge an apothecary’s daughter!  See if you like better a dressmaker, a nurse to Katy’s baby, Marian Hazelton!”

He whispered the last name, and with a shriek the lady fainted.  Mr. Cameron would not summon a servant, and as there was no water in the room, he walked to the window, and lifting the sash scraped from the sill a handful of the light spring snow which had been falling since noon.  With this he brought his wife back to consciousness, and then marked out her future course.