way--yes!--oh, you needn't say it!--out of mine, too. Look here!"
he cried, passionately; "don't you think I didn't know you? All
you looked for or lived for was--" But he broke off there, and
surveyed her with an affronted dullness, as if it were only
wasted effort. "Oh, well, what's the use?" he muttered, and with
morose and glowering eyes slouched through the doorway.

Mrs. Willoughby lay among the pillows, her arms flung out and her
face half hidden by her disordered hair. TO BE POOR! Her mind
seized on that as the one incalculable shame that had befallen
her--on that, rather than on her view of his dishonesty.
Curiously enough, it was not only the loss of the money itself
and the imminent surrender of her ease and luxury and ostentation
that dismayed her. She was anguished, as well, by the stigma of
being poor. She was able to see only the mean side of it; the
pity of her friends already rang in her ears like scorn, mocking
her because the one thing that had made her was now stripped
away. Hers was not the nature to see the other side of it--the
helpful nobility of self-denial, the heroism of unselfishness,
the courage that stoically faces the narrow and sordid effort
whose rewards are only in the future. No, indeed!--there was only
a savage resentment in her mind, the inexplicable sense that
somehow she had been tricked and cheated, and that he alone was
to blame.

Though she accused him of dishonesty in the Severance affair, the
charge was only secondary. Given another time, she might
carelessly have acquitted him, taking his own say-so as enough;
but Willoughby now had chosen a poor hour for his acknowledgment,
when he linked it to the tidings of his ruin. All that day she