Family Pride

"Wilford is not dead," he said, when at last she was in the carriage. "It is worse than that, I fear. We have traced him to the Philadelphia train, which he took on Saturday. His manner all that day and the previous one was very strange, while from some words he dropped my wife is led to suppose there was trouble between you two. Was there?" and Father Cameron's gray eyes rested earnestly on the white, frightened face which looked up so quickly as Katy gasped: "No, oh, no; he never was kinder to me than when we parted last Friday morning at Mrs. Mills'. There is some mistake. He would not leave me, though he has not been quite the same since--"

Katy was interrupted by the carriage stopping before her home; but when they had been admitted to the parlor where a fire was lighted, Father Cameron said: "Go on now. Wilford has not been the same since when?"

Thus importuned Katy continued: "Since baby died. I think he blamed me as the cause of its death."

"Don't babies die every day?" Father Cameron growled, kicking at the hearth rug, while Katy, without considering that he had never heard of Genevra, continued: "And then it was worse after I found out about Genevra, his first wife."

"Genevra! Genevra, Wilford's first wife! Thunder and lightning! what are you talking about?" and Father Cameron bent down to look in Katy's face, thinking she was going mad.

But Katy was not mad, and knowing it was now too late to retract, she told the story of Genevra Lambert to the old man, who, utterly confounded, stalked up and down the room, kicking away chairs and footstools, and whatever came in his way, and swearing promiscuously at his wife and Wilford, whom he pronounced a precious pair of fools, with a dreadful adjective appended to the fools, and an emphasis in his voice which showed he meant what he said.

"It's all accounted for now," he said, "the piles of money that boy had abroad, his privacy with his mother, and all the other tomfoolery I could not understand. Katy," and pausing in his walk, Mr. Cameron came close to his daughter-in-law, who was lying with her face upon the sofa. "Katy, be glad your baby died. Had it lived it might have proved a curse just as mine have done--not all, for Bell, though fiery as a pepper-pod, has some heart, some sense--and there was Jack, my oldest boy, a little fast, it's true; but when he died over the sea, I forgave all that, forgetting the chair he broke over a tutor's head, and the scrapes for which I paid as high as a thousand at one time. He sowed his wild oats, and died before he could reap them, died a good man, I believe, and went to heaven. Juno you know, and you can judge whether she is such as would delight a parent's heart; while Wilford, my only boy, to deceive me so; though I knew he was a fool in some things, I did trust Wilford."