Wishing himself to know something definite ere going to Mrs. Hull, Morris yielded to her entreaties, and sitting down in front of her, said again:  “Now tell me what brought you here without your husband’s knowledge.”

There was a shiver, and the white lips grew still whiter as Katy began her story, going back to St. Mary’s churchyard, and then coming to her first night in New York, when Juno had told her of a picture and asked her whose it was.  Then she told of Wilford’s admission of an earlier love, who, he said, was dead; of the trouble about the baby’s name, and his aversion to Genevra; of his frequent abstracted moods, which she remembered now, never suspecting at the time their cause, and not knowing now for certain that Genevra was the subject of his thoughts.  But it was safe to believe almost anything of one who had deceived her so cruelly, and Katy’s blue eyes flashed resentfully as she uttered the first bitter words she had ever breathed against her husband.  But when she approached the dinner at the elder Cameron’s, her lip quivered in a grieved kind of way as she remembered what Wilford had said of her to his mother, but she would not tell this to Morris, it was not necessary to her story, and so she said:  “They were talking of what I ought never to have heard, and it seemed as if the walls were closing me in so that I could not move to let them know I was there.  I said to myself, ’I shall go mad after this,’ and I thought of you all coming to see me in the madhouse, your kind face, Morris, coming up distinctly before me, just as it would look at me if I were really crazed.  But all this was swept away like a hurricane when I heard the rest, the part about Genevra, Wilford’s other wife.”

Katy was panting for breath and Morris brought the wine again, after which she went on with the story, which made Morris clinch his hands as he comprehended the deceit which had been practiced so long.  Of course he did not look at it as Katy did, for he knew that according to all civil law she was as really Wilford’s wife as if no other had existed, and he told her so, but Katy shook her head:  “He can’t have two wives living, and I tell you I knew the picture—­Genevra is not dead.  I have seen her; I have talked with her—­Genevra is not dead.”

“Granted that she is not,” Morris answered, “the divorce remains the same.”

“I do not believe in divorces.  ’Whom God hath joined together let no man put asunder,’” Katy said with an air which implied that from this argument there could be no appeal.

“That is the Scripture I know,” Morris replied, “but you must remember that for one sin our Savior permitted a man to put away his wife, thus making it perfectly right.”

“But in Genevra’s case the sin did not exist.  She was as innocent as I am, and that must make a difference.”

She was very earnest in her attempts to prove that Genevra was still a lawful wife, so earnest that a dark suspicion entered Morris’s mind, finding vent in the question, “Katy, don’t you love your husband, that you try so hard to prove he is not yours?”