there was any question of divorce.

That was another confusing fact. Adelaide had managed him so beautifully.
Her father had not known her wonderful powers until he saw the skill and
patience with which she had dealt with Joe Severance's drinking. Joe
himself was eager to own that he owed his cure entirely to her. Mr.
Lanley had been proud of her; she had turned out, he thought, just what a
woman ought to be; and then, on top of it, she had come to him one day
and announced that she would never live with Joe again.

"But why not?" he had asked.

"Because I don't love him," she had said.

Then Mr. Lanley knew how little his acceptance of the idea of divorce in
general had reconciled him to the idea of the divorce of his own
daughter--a Lanley--Mrs. Adelaide Lanley, Mrs. Adelaide Severance. His
sense of fitness was shocked, though he pleaded with her first on the
ground of duty, and then under the threat of scandal. With her beauty
and Severance's popularity, for from his college days he had been
extremely popular with men, the divorce excited uncommon interest.
Severance's unconcealed grief, a rather large circle of devoted friends
in whom he confided, and the fact that Adelaide had to go to Nevada to
get her divorce, led most people to believe that she had simply found
some one she liked better. Mr. Lanley would have believed it himself,
but he couldn't. Farron had not appeared until she had been divorced for
several years.

Lanley still cherished an affection for Severance, who had very soon
married again, a local belle in the Massachusetts manufacturing town