“Isn’t it going as well with you as you expected?” she asked.
“Your finishing him could do my cause no harm, at least,” said he, and bit his lip.
“Well, I vow I’m sometimes a’most sorry for her,” she said. “She’s but my own age, and—and the man’s in love with her all the time, and at a word she’d be with him. Don’t I know that? What a brace of blackguards we are, George!”
“Speak for yourself, Mrs. Moll,” said Hamilton, a little hotly. “Love absolves all sinners. It knows no villainy but incompetence.”
“Sure, you must be a saint, then. But betwixt this and that, and your doubt’s despite, it wasn’t in the bargain and I won’t do it.”
“Then that settles it, and we must manage without.”
“As you like.” She brought her hands to the front, and, linking them in the most decorous of love-knots, stiffened her neck and tossed her head backwards and a little askew. “Besides,” she said, “you seem to forget that I’ve got a husband myself.”
He burst into a laugh, vexed but uncontrollable, and immediately checked himself.
“I had forgot—I confess it,” he said. “Kit, is it not?”
“Kit!” she ejaculated, in deep scorn. And then she, too, laughed derisively.