“Never!”

The word rang out in true womanly revolt.  “I will die before that day ever comes to separate me from the man I love and the child who calls me mother.  You may force me from this house, you may plunge me into poverty, into contumely, but you shall never make me look upon myself as other than the wife of this good man, whom I have wronged but will never disgrace.”

“Madam,” declared the inflexible secretary with a derisive appreciation which bowed her once proud head upon her shamed breast, “you are all I thought you when I took you from Crabbe’s back-pantry in Boone to make you the honor and glory of a life which I knew then, as well as I do now, would not long run in obscure channels.”

It was a sarcasm calculated to madden the proud man who, only a few minutes before, had designated the object of it by the sacred name of wife.  But beyond a hasty glance at the woman it had bowed almost to the ground, the mayor gave no evidence of feeling either its force or assumption.  Other thoughts were in his mind than those roused by jealous anger.  “How old were you then?” he demanded with alarming incongruity.  The secretary started.  He answered, however, calmly enough: 

“I?  Seven years ago I was twenty-five.  I am thirty-two now.”

“So I have heard you say.  A man of twenty-five is old enough to have made a record, Mr. Steele—­” The mayor’s tone hardened, so did his manner; and I saw why he had been such a power in the courts before he took up politics and an office.  “Mr. Steele, I do not mean you to disturb my house or to rob me of my wife.  What was your life before you met Olympia Brewster?”

A pause, the slightest in the world,—­but the keen eye of the astute lawyer noted it, and his tone grew in severity and assurance.  “You have known for two years that this woman whom you called yours was within your reach, if not under your very eye, and you forbore to claim her.  Has this delay had anything to do with the record of those years to which I have just alluded?”

Had the random shot told?  The secretary’s eye did not falter, nor his figure lose an inch of its height, yet the impression made by his look and attitude were not the same; the fire had gone out of them; a blight had struck his soul—­the flush of his triumph was gone.

Mayor Packard was merciless.

“Only two considerations could hold back a man like you from urging a claim he regarded as a sacred right; the fact of a former marriage or the remembrance of a forfeited citizenship—­pardon me, we can not mince matters in a strait like this—­which would delegalize whatever contract you may have entered into.”

Still the secretary’s eye did not swerve, though he involuntarily stretched forth his hand toward the table as if afraid of betraying a tremor in his rigidly drawn-up figure.

“Was there the impediment of a former marriage?”

No answer from the sternly set lips.