The Substitute Prisoner | Page 6

bracing morning air. But the tormenting presence of the
intercepted letter in his pocket drew him back to the house. He
encountered his wife in the hallway.
"There was some mail for me--where is it?" she said, extending a hand
confidently.
He produced the letter from his pocket, poising it tantalizingly between
his fingers. She recognized the handwriting and a wave of red mounted
to her forehead. Also, she observed the ragged slit at the top of the
envelope and the painful realization that he had read the contents
rushed on her.
"How dared you?" She tried to seize the letter, but he, anticipating her
move, withdrew his arm and thrust the missive into his pocket. "I didn't
believe it possible you could sink so low," she murmured. "But this is
the end," she added with sudden vehemence. "I shall leave this house
to-day."
"Oh, no, you won't!" An angry scowl contorted his face. "You've
flaunted your superior virtues in my face--accused me of cruelty and
neglect and selfishness. Everybody, including your brother, believes
you to be the long-suffering, patient little angel. You've been the
woman with the noble soul--I've been the unworthy rascal. Now you
stand there, your feelings outraged, because I had the foresight to
intercept an incriminating letter. You calmly tell me it's the end. You're
going to leave. It makes no difference how much scandal you bring on
my name. You--"
She checked him with a contemptuous toss of the head. All the
suffering which she had endured through the years of their married life
now resolved itself into a fury of resentment.
"Your name!" she exclaimed with cutting irony. "As if anything which
I might do could add to the weight of dishonor that you have imposed

upon it! I don't know the contents of that letter, but it's from Herbert
Whitmore and he's as incapable of a dishonorable act as you are
incapable of anything honorable. And you had the audacity to open and
read that letter!"
She paused, fixing him with her eyes, her lips curled into a disdainful
smile. But the fire of her scorn left him unseared. His calloused
sensibilities had long ago lost their capability of appreciating a nature
such as hers. For his wife to have a letter addressed to her such as he
had intercepted, spelled guilt. The debasing environment into which he
had plunged on inheriting the fortune which his father had accumulated,
had undermined all his faith in womanhood. He could not see beyond
the Tenderloin purview.
But pride and selfishness were screamingly alive within him. To these
was added the inordinate conceit of the habitual libertine, a
combination than which there is nothing more sensitive in the entire
human composition.
But as Collins gazed on the graceful lines of her full figure and on the
almost classic beauty of her marmoreal features, he could not stifle a
pang of anxiety at thought of losing her. The fact that he had discarded
her in all but name, for the dubious pleasures of a life of dissipation,
did not occur to him. He believed in the established moral code that
excuses the offenses of the man and eternally condemns the woman.
Yet, ready as he was to attribute culpability to her conduct, it was hard
even for him to reconcile her smooth, artless brow, her frank, limpid
eyes, her delicate, sensitive lips, with any act that savored of
unworthiness or deceit.
"It's hard to look at you and believe you guilty of wrong," he said
resentfully.
"It makes no difference to me what you believe," she snapped. "I'm
through with you! I shall obtain a divorce."
The storm which had been gathering force within him all morning now
broke in all its fury.

"You're going to get a divorce!" he cried ironically. "You still pretend
to be the injured one. You and Whitmore have it all framed up--eh! But
I tell you you've miscalculated this time! No man can wreck my home
with impunity! No man can enter my house to steal my wife--and get
away with it. I've been blind a long time, but my eyes are wide open
now."
He walked to the telephone at the rear of the hall and lifted the receiver
off the hook.
"What are you going to do?" she demanded.
"Call up your brother. We'll see what he has to say about it."
Lester Ward, the brother of Mrs. Collins, also lived in Delmore Park.
He had succeeded to his father's banking business and occupied the
house which his parents had left. Fifteen minutes after Collins
summoned him over the telephone, he was seated in his sister's library,
prepared to mediate in what he guessed to be another quarrel between
her and her husband.
"This letter will explain itself," Collins opened the