“She wronged you—­she acknowledges that—­but it was the wrong of an unthinking child—­not of a realizing woman.  Would you, a realizing man, tear her now from home, from her child, from her place in the community and my heart—­make her despicable as well as unhappy, just to feed your revenge?”

“Yes, I would do that.”

“Jeopardize interests you have so often professed in my hearing to be far above personal consideration—­the success of your party, the triumph of your political principles?”

“My political principles!” Oh, the irony of his voice, the triumph in his laugh!  “And what do you know of them?  What I have said.  Mayor Packard, your education as a politician has yet to be completed before you will be fit for the governorship of a state.  I am an adept at the glorification of the party, of the man that it suits my present exigencies to promote, but it is a faculty which should have made you pause before you trusted me with the furtherance and final success of a campaign which may outlast those exigencies.  I have not always been of your party; I am not so now at heart.”

The mayor, outraged in every sentiment of honor as well as in the most cherished feelings of his heart, lowered upon his unmoved secretary with a wrath which would have borne down any other man before it.

“Do you mean to say, you, that your work is a traitor’s work?  That the glorification you speak of is false?  That you may talk in my favor, but that when you come to the issue, you will vote according to your heart; that is, for Stanton?”

“I have succeeded in making myself intelligible.”

The mayor flushed; indignation gave him vehemence.

“Then,” he cried, “I take back the word by which I qualified you a moment ago.  You are not a villain, you are a dastard.”

Mr. Steele bowed in a way which turned the opprobrium into a seeming compliment.

“I have suffered so many wrongs at your hands that I can not wonder at suffering this one more.”

Then slowly and with a short look at her:  “The woman who has queened it so long in C—–­ society can not wish to undergo the charge of bigamy?”

“You will bring such a charge?”

“Certainly, if she does not voluntarily quit her false position, and, accepting the protection of the man whose name is really hers, go from this house at once.”

At this alternative, uttered with icy deliberation, Mrs. Packard recoiled with a sharp cry; but the mayor thrust a sudden sarcastic query at his opponent: 

“Which name?  Steele or Brainard?  You acknowledged both.”

“My real name is Brainard; therefore, it is also hers.  But I shall be content if she will take my present one of Steele.  More than that, I shall be content if she will honestly accept from my hands a place of refuge where I swear she shall remain unmolested by me till this matter can be legally settled.  I do not wish to make myself hateful to her, for I anticipate the day when she will be my wife in heart as she is now in law.”