She turned on me in the most terrible way, and asked me how I dared to come between husband and wife, because divorce or no divorce, whom God hath joined together, and so on.  And when Jim picked up his courage in both hands and tried to interfere, she pushed him back with one hand while she pointed the other at me and called me a Jezebel.

Chapter XIX.  THE HARBISON MAN

She talked for an hour, having got between me and the door, and she scolded Jim and Bella thoroughly.  But they did not hear it, being occupied with each other, sitting side by side meekly on the divan with Jim holding Bella’s hand under a cushion.  She said they would have to be very good to make up for all the deception, but it was perfectly clear that it was a relief to her to find that I didn’t belong to her permanently, and as I have said before, she was crazy about Bella.

I sat back in a chair and grew comfortably drowsy in the monotony of her voice.  It was a name that brought me to myself with a jerk.

“Mr. Harbison!” Aunt Selina was saying.  “Then bring him down at once, James.  I want no more deception.  There is no use cleaning a house and leaving a dirty corner.”

“It will not be necessary for me to stay and see it swept,” I said, mustering the rags she had left of my self-respect, and trying to pass her.  But she planted herself squarely before me.

“You can not stir up a dust like this, young woman, and leave other people to sneeze in it,” she said grimly.  And I stayed.

I sat, very small, on a chair in a corner.  I felt like Jezebel, or whatever her name was, and now the Harbison man was coming, and he was going to see me stripped of my pretensions to domesticity and of a husband who neglected me.  He was going to see me branded a living lie, and he would hate me because I had put him in a ridiculous position.  He was just the sort to resent being ridiculous.

Jim brought him down in a dressing gown and a state of bewilderment.  It was plain that the memory of the afternoon still rankled, for he was very short with Jim and inclined to resent the whole thing.  The clock in the hall chimed half after three as they came down the stairs, and I heard Mr. Harbison stumble over something in the darkness and say that if it was a joke, he wasn’t in the humor for it.  To which Jim retorted that it wasn’t anything resembling a joke, and for heaven’s sake not to walk on his feet; he couldn’t get around the furniture any faster.

At the door of the den Mr. Harbison stopped, blinking in the light.  Then, when he saw us, he tried to back himself and his dishabille out into the obscurity of the library.  But Aunt Selina was too quick for him.

“Come in,” she called, “I want you, young man.  It seems that there are only two fools in the house, and you are one.”

He straightened at that and looked bewildered, but he tried to smile.