“Chuck it!” said 90, a saturnine man.
“That’s what I done, Kroojer,” said Jim. “You go and ’unt in the bloomin’ ’edges if you don’t believe me.”
“It’s my duty to tell you,” said 33, “that whatever you says will be took down in evidence agen you.”
“Not by you,” said Jim. “Why, you can’t spell.”
They carried him off dispassionately, with some rough, kindly apologies to Miss Belmont for the trouble to which they had put her. She locked and bolted the door when they were gone; mechanically saw to the lamps, and went upstairs to bed in a sort of stunned dream. So she committed herself to the sheets, and so, in a sort of waking delirium, passed the remaining hours of slumber. She felt as if the even tenor of her way, her stream of placid days, had been suddenly dammed by a dead body, the self-destroyed corpse of her own character. Sometimes she would start from a suffering negation to feel B 90’s hand upon her shoulder. “What have I done—O! what have I done?” she would moan in anguish; and B 90 would glower from under his helmet like a passionless Rhadamanthus—
“What have you done? What but, like our second Henry, meanly, by inference and innuendo, imposed upon your wretched tool the responsibility for a deed which you dared not seek to compass by the open processes of the law. Did you dispute the right ownership of the button? Then why choose for your confidant an ex-thief and poacher? No use to say you designed no harm. By the flower be known the seed. Come along o’ me!”
She rose late, ate no breakfast, and sat awaiting, pinched and grey, the inevitable ordeal. It opened, early enough, with the advent of Mrs. John. The little widow came sailing in, with a face of floured steel. When she saw, the edge of her tongue seemed to whet itself on her lips. Miss Emma broke out at once in an unendurable cry—
“Inez! You can’t think I was a party to this!”
“Who said so, dear? Though the man was a protégé of yours, and was known to have remained where he encountered me by your instructions.”
“It is not true.”