Mrs. Bob: A Novel — page 127: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

SENATOR JOHN’S SECRET. 119 year, give you some brotherly advice, at this the last half hour of your bachelor life.’’ ‘‘Five minutes you say—willingly dear John. Iam amazed at one thing—TI thought you an old _ bachelor —you never breathed your secret.”’ A spasm of pain crosses the other’s face. ‘‘And only that I love you, Bcb, as my own younger brother, I would not speak of it now. It is because I believe the brief recital of my story may profit you and your wife that I unseal my past for this five minutes. Please never allude to it again.”’ A warm clasp of the hand tells that Bob’s heart beats in sympathy’with him. “It was—let me see, nearly twenty years ago. I was then just thirty, well-to-do, successful as a law- yer, fairly good looking, and possessed of a rather quick temper. ‘Fate threw me in the way of Ruth—we met ina singular way—lI loved her passionately, wooed and won her. I need not tell what a fight I had to get her, for she had another determined suitor, a country squire, who exhausted every means to defeat me, even going so far as to prejudice her father, the dominie, against me. “But I won at last—she loved me devotedly—an elopement followed—we were married and her father never forgave me for it. ‘We were very happy, Bob—a child came to bless us, a dear little thing so like its mother. My business began to worry me some, and I became testy. One day the strain caused me to have hot words with my wife—she was in the right—I suspected it, became Gomicbookssco iin