Manslaughter

								

reckless emotion which may lead one to marry badly and the cold-blooded
determination to marry well.
She was just past forty the day Joe Thorne came. She could still see him
as he entered in his blue overcoat with a velvet collar. A big powerful
man with prominent eyes like Bismarck's, and a heavy dark brown mustache
bulging over his upper lip. He did not expect to give much time to the
interview. He had come to see if Miss Bennett would do to bring up his
daughter, who at ten years was giving him trouble. He wanted her
prepared for the social opportunities he intended her to have. It seemed
strange to him that a person who lived as simply as Miss Bennett could
really have these social opportunities in her control, but he had been
advised by people whom he trusted that such was the fact, and he
accepted it.
He was the son of a Kansas farmer, had left the farm as a boy and
settled in a small town, and had learned the trade of bricklaying. By
hard work he gradually amassed a few hundred dollars, and this he
invested in a gravel bank just outside the town. It was the only gravel
bank in the neighborhood and brought him a high return on the money.
Then just as the gravel was exhausted the town began to spread in that
direction, and Thorne was arranging to level his property and sell it in
building lots, when a still more unexpected development took place. Oil
was struck in the neighborhood, and beneath Thorne's gravel lay a well.
If Fate had intended him to be poor she should never have allowed him to
make his first thousand dollars, for from the moment he had any surplus
everything he touched did well. In one of his trips to the Louisiana oil
district he met and married a local belle, a slim, pale girl with
immense dark-circled black eyes and a skin like a gardenia. She followed
him meekly about the country from oil wells to financial centers until
after the birth of her daughter. Then she settled down in Kansas City
and waited his rare visits. The only inconsiderate thing she had ever
done to him was to die and leave him with an eight-year-old daughter.
For several stormy years he tried various solutions--foreign governesses
who tried to marry him, American college girls who attempted to make
him take his fair share of parental responsibility, an old cousin who
had been a school teacher and dared to criticize his manner of life. At
last his enlarging affairs brought him to New York and he heard of Miss
Bennett. He heard of her through Wiley, his lawyer. Wiley, a man in the
forties, then attaining preëminence at the bar in New York, had been
thought by many people to be an ideal husband for Adeline. They were old
friends. He admired her, wished her well, and thought of her instantly
when his new client applied to him for help.
The minute Thorne saw Miss Bennett he saw that she would do perfectly.
He made her the offer of a good salary. He couldn't believe that she
would refuse it. She could hardly believe it herself, for she was