It would break my heart if anything happened to my darling wife, or--" he finished the sentence in a whisper, for he was not yet accustomed to speaking of the great hope he had in expectancy.
He was looking at Ethelyn now, and the expression of her face startled and terrified him, it was so strange and terrible.
"Not go to Washington!" and her livid lips quivered with passion, while her eyes burned like coals of fire.

"I stay here all this long, dreary winter with your mother! Never, Richard, never! I'll die before I'll do that.

It is all--" she did not finish the sentence, for she would not say, "It is all I married you for"; she was too much afraid of Richard for that, and so she hesitated, but looked at him intently to see if he was in earnest.
She knew he was at last--knew that neither tears, nor reproaches, nor bitter scorn could avail to carry her point, for she tried them all, even to violent hysterics, which brought Mrs.Markham, senior, into the field and made the matter ten times worse.

Had she stayed away Richard might have yielded, for he was frightened at the storm he had invoked; but Richard was passive in his mother's hands, and listened complacently while in stronger, plainer language than he had used she repeated in substance all he had said about the impropriety of Ethelyn's mingling with the gay throng at Washington.

Immodesty, Mrs.Markham called it, with sundry reflections upon the time when she was young, and what young married women did then.