“But you know it is a lie! Some one must have seen us the other evening when we were standing downstairs. You had better not come here, then. When you have some money, you will send it to me,” she concluded, between genuine sympathy and an intention to draw him out.
“Ach, don’t say that, Mamie. What is the good of my life without you? I don’t sleep nights. Since she came I began to understand how dear you are to me. I can not tell it so well,” he said, pointing to his heart.
“Yes, but before she came you didn’t care for me!” she declared, labouring to disguise the exultation which made her heart dance.
“I always did, Mamie. May I drop from this roof and break hand and foot if I did not.”
A flood of wan light struck Mamie full in her swarthy face, suffusing it with ivory effulgence, out of which her deep dark eyes gleamed with a kind of unearthly lustre. Jake stood enravished. He took her by the hand, but she instantly withdrew it, edging away a step. His touch somehow restored her to calm self-possession, and even kindled a certain thirst for revenge in her heart.
“It is not what it used to be, Jake,” she said in tones of complaisant earnestness. “Now that I know you are a married man it is all gone. Yes, Jake, it is all gone! You should have cared for me when she was still there. Then you could have gone to a rabbi and sent her a writ of divorce. It is too late now, Jake.”
“It is not too late!” he protested, tremulously. “I will get a divorce, anyhoy. And if you don’t take me I will hang myself,” he added, imploringly.
“On a burned straw?” she retorted, with a cruel chuckle.
“It is all very well for you to laugh. But if you could enter my heart and see how I shuffer!”
“Woe is me! I don’t see how you will stand it,” she mocked him. And abruptly assuming a grave tone, she pursued vehemently: “But I don’t understand; since you sent her tickets and money, you must like her.”