“How dare you come here?” she still gasped, bewildered.
“Oh, I dare go anywhere, after you, Frank! And I may as well tell you, that’s what I came for!”
She still shivered from head to foot. It was not that she was afraid of him. It was only that, in this new beginning of life, she was afraid of some unforeseen disaster. And she knew that she would kill herself, gladly, rather than go with him.
“Now, cool down, little woman,” MacNutt was saying to her in his placid guttural. “We’ve been through enough scrapes together to know each other, so there’s no use you gettin’ high-strung and nervous. And I guess you know I’m no piker, when it comes to anybody I care about. I never went back on you, Frank, even though you did treat me like a dog and swing in with that damned welcher Durkin, and try to bleed me for my last five hundred. I tell you, Frank, I can’t get used to the thought of not havin’ you ’round!”
She gave forth a little inarticulate cry of hate and abhorrence for him. She could see that he had been drinking, and that he was shattered, both in body and nerve.
“Oh, you’ll get over that! I’ve knocked around with women—I’ve been makin’ and spendin’ money fast enough for anybody this season; but no one’s just the same as you! You thought I was good enough to work with once, and I guess I ought to be good enough to travel with now!”
“That’s enough!” she broke in, wrathfully. She had grown calmer by this time, and her thoughts were returning to her mind now, buzzing and rapid, like bees in a fallen hive.
“No, it’s not,” he retorted, with an ominous shake of the square jaw and beefy neck. “And you just wait until I finish. You’ve been playin’ pretty fast and loose with me, Frank Candler, and I’ve been takin’ it meek and quiet, for I knew you’d soon get tired of this two-cent piker you’ve been workin’ the wires with!”
She opened her lips to speak, but no sound came from them.
“I tell you, Frank, you’re not the sort of woman that can go half fed and half dressed, driftin’ ’round dowdy and hungry and homeless, most of the time! You’re too fine for all that kind o’ thing. A woman like you has got to have money, and be looked after, and showed around, and let take things easy—or what’s the use o’ bein’ a beauty, anyway! You know all that, ’s well as I do!”