“Anything else?”
“My object, perhaps.”
“Indeed? Is not this frankness, now, to be mutual?”
“It was partly,” said Gilead, “that I wished to investigate a very curious affair. I am a seeker after the truth, a—if I may so put it, a practical psychologist. My sole scruple was that, in applying for the post, I risked deposing a more deserving, because a more needy, candidate.”
“The money was no object to you then?”
“None whatever.”
The other nodded with some melancholy gratification.
“The indifference shall be reciprocal,” he said. “It shall be none to me. Indeed I could no longer think of insulting your psychology by any suggestion of payment.”
“Very well,” said Gilead. “I have no wish to tax your conscience in a fresh matter. What its sensitiveness decrees is sure to be right.”
He spoke with fathomless irony; but, at the word conscience, the stranger seized his bill-hook and set to chopping again with a violence that was simply destructive.