Now and then she was ill. Terribly ill. A pain began in her chest and ran down her left arm, her heart beat like a fluttering bird, and a cold sweat broke out all over her. It terrified her. She could stand the pain better than the terror. Then it would pass, and there would be Henry, strangely gentle and very pale. That would have been the time to talk to him about Kay, but she was always too weak to speak. And when she tried to he would bend over her, still white and shaken, and say:
"Hush now. Don't talk. Just close your eyes and rest."
The terror was that she would die before she had said to Kay the things she had been too shy to say all those years.
Then one day Henry opened his copy of the Ursula paper—his subscription had not yet run out—and read that Tom McNair had come back bringing a wife with him, "the late Miss Katherine Dowling." He rang for Rutherford and ordered the paper taken out and destroyed, and that night in his library he wrote a letter by hand, and marked it personal and confidential.
My dear Tulloss: Probably long before this you have learned what has occurred in my family. I need not enlarge on it. You will know what a shock and disappointment we have had. Scandal, too, I regret to say, but that is comparatively unimportant.
Before I make the request which is the purpose of this letter, let me make my position clear. I do not regard my daughter's marriage to this cowboy as a permanent thing. I know her. It is the result of a brief infatuation, of romantic nonsense picked up by her God knows how last summer, and of her own imagination. I fancy, too, that the stimulation of the altitude—but that is not pertinent. As I say, I know her. She has always had everything, and more. She is both fastidious and luxurious. If this fellow has not already destroyed her illusions about him he soon will. Her pride will carry her on for a time after that, but not long.
