I strode forward and shook him roughly by the shoulder.
"To whom?" I hissed.
"To Marion, Marion Le Mar." He sat up and looked dazedly around. "Oh, do what you please," he cried wildly, as he met my eyes. "What do I care—I have not long to live in any case. A few months more or less, what does it matter? And she—God help her, she needs it—needs it as well you know—you hard, inhuman devil!"
"You are mad!" I hissed. "What claim has that woman upon you?"
"The woman I love?" He sprang to his feet and faced me with just such a look as a tiger might defend his mate. "The woman I should have married, but for the accursed laws of the society which you enticed me into joining!"
"You are a consumptive, a death's head!" I sneered. "A nice man you to marry any woman! Fool that you are, ask yourself would she have married you?"
He gave me a look of almost sublime contempt. "She loves me!" he said, and there was in his bearing a dignity so proudly self-conscious, yet compassionate, that my heart went out to the man; I began to pity him profoundly, ay, and wish to help him. I could hardly understand myself. I had never felt like that for any living creature prior to that instant. But I had work to do, pressing work, and I put my feelings resolutely aside.
"George Cavanagh," said I, "you reproach me with having bound you to a society whose laws forbid your marrying the woman you love. But it seems to me you aspire to break another of its laws in giving her this money. What of that?"
"Fear nothing," he replied in tones of ice. "I shall pay the penalty. When next the society foregathers at your house, Fulton will announce your numbers lessened by one death."
In spite of myself I started. Aha! thought I—I grow hot upon the track.