“You are at liberty to put it any way you please,” he responded to her taunt, with grave courtesy. “I called you to tell you that I am going to marry Alice to-morrow, and that I will not have her personality interfered with any more.”
“Oh, you won’t? How are you going to help it?”
He looked at her eyes sparkling with mischievous defiance, at her red lips pouted in saucy insolence, and he wavered. Then in the instant revulsion from this weakness he turned to the fire and took from the coals the glowing poker.
“That is how I mean to help it,” he said.
She shrank and turned pale; but she did not yield.
“You can’t fool me like that,” she said. “You would n’t really hurt the body of that precious Alice of yours. You can’t burn me without her being burned too.”
“She had better be burned than to be under the control of a little devil like you.”
For the moment they faced each other, and then her glance dropped. She fell on her knees with a bitter cry, and held up to him her clasped hands.
“Oh, why can’t you let me stay!” she half sobbed. “Why won’t you give me a chance? You don’t know how good I’ll be! I’ll do every single thing you want me to. I know all your ways as well as she does, and I’ll make you happy. Why should n’t I have as much right to live as she?”
The wail of her pleading almost unmanned him. He felt instinctively that his only chance of carrying through his plan was to refuse to listen. The thought surged into his mind that perhaps she had as much claim to consciousness as Alice; he seemed to be murdering this strange creature kneeling to him with streaming eyes and quivering mouth. He had to turn away so as not to see her.