"Harm! Oh, no! Such milk-white doves as you never harm anything. They only fire a man's heart with love, then torment him with it, like witches—soft-spoken, smiling witches—that make us devils with their jibes, and idiots with their tears. Oh, I hardly know which is most enticing, love or hate, for such creatures."
"Don't! don't! You frighten me!" pleaded the girl.
"Aye, there it is. Faint at a plain word; but work out murder and bloodshed with the witchcraft of your false smiles and lying tears. That is what you have done, Ruth Jessup."
"No! no!" cried the girl, putting up her hands.
"Who was it that set her own father and sweetheart at each other?"
"Hush! I will not hear this. It is false—it is cruel. There was no quarrel between them—no evil blood."
"No quarrel—no evil blood! She says that, looking meek as a spring-lamb, chewing the lie in her mouth as that does clover. But what if I tell you that the old man in yonder knew just all that happened after I was turned out of the kitchen that night?"
"It was you who told him that which might have brought great trouble on him and me; only good men are slow to believe evil of those they love. I knew from his own lips that you had waylaid him in the park with a wicked falsehood."
"It was the truth, every word of it," exclaimed Storms, stamping his foot on the floor. "I saw it with my own eyes."
"Saw what?" faltered the girl, sick with apprehension.