, I have been
terribly punished."

Mr. Cameron could not look upon the woman who stood before him, so
helpless and stricken in her desolation, and believe her wrong in
anything. The guilt lay in another direction, and when as the terrible
reality that she was indeed a deserted wife came rushing over Katy, she
tottered toward him for help, he stretched his arms out for her, and
taking the sinking figure in them, laid it upon the sofa as gently, as
kindly as Wilford had ever touched it in his most loving days.

Katy did not faint nor weep. She was past all that, but her face was
like a piece of marble, and her eyes were like those of the hunted fawn
when the chase is at its height and escape impossible.

"Wilford would come back if he knew just how it was," the father said,
"but the trouble is where to find him. He speaks of writing to me, as I
presume he will in a day or so, and perhaps it will be as well to wait
till then. What the plague--who is ringing that bell enough to break the
wire?" he added, as a sharp, rapid ring echoed through the house and was
answered by Esther. "It's my wife," he continued, as he caught the sound
of her voice asking if Mrs. Cameron had returned. "You stay here while I
meet her first alone. I'll give it to her for cheating me so long and
raising thunder generally!"

Katy tried to protest, but he was halfway down the stairs, and in a
moment more was with his wife, who had come around armed and equipped to
censure Katy as the cause of Wilford's disappearance, and to demand of
her where she was the night she pretended to spend at No. ---- Fifth
Avenue. But the lady who came in so haughty and indignant was a very
different personage from the lady who, after listening for fifteen
minutes to a fearful storm of oaths and reproaches, mingled with
startling truths and bitter denunciations against herself and her boy,
sank into a chair, pale and trembling, and overwhelmed with the harvest
she was reaping.

But her husband was not through with her yet. He had reserved the
bitterest drop for the last, and coming close to her he said:

"And who think you the woman is--this Genevra, Wilford's and your
divorced wife? You were too proud to acknowledge an apothecary's
daughter! See if you like better a dressmaker, a nurse to Katy's baby,
Marian Hazelton!"

He whispered the last name, and with a shriek the lady fainted. Mr.
Cameron would not summon a servant, and as there was no water in the
room, h