He sat down again and looked at her critically. “Yes, as far as you're concerned I WAS lying! I know your style. But as you know, too, that I'd kill you and the first man I suspected, and there ain't a judge or a jury in all Californy that wouldn't let me go free for it, and even consider, too, that it had wiped off the whole slate agin me—it's to my credit!”
“I know what you men call chivalry,” she said coldly, “but I did not come here to buy a knowledge of that. So now about the child?” she ended abruptly, leaning forward again with the same look of eager solicitude in her eyes.
“Well, about the child—our child—though, perhaps, I prefer to say MY child,” he began, with a certain brutal frankness. “I'll tell you. But first, I don't want you to talk about BUYING your information of me. If I haven't told you anything before, it's because I didn't think you oughter know. If I didn't trust the child to YOU, it's because I didn't think you could go shashaying about with a child that was three years old when I”—he stopped and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand—“made an honest woman of you—I think that's what they call it.”
“But,” she said eagerly, ignoring the insult, “I could have hidden it where no one but myself would have known it. I could have sent it to school and visited it as a relation.”
“Yes,” he said curtly, “like all women, and then blurted it out some day and made it worse.”
“But,” she said desperately, “even THEN, suppose I had been willing to take the shame of it! I have taken more!”
“But I didn't intend that you should,” he said roughly.
“You are very careful of my reputation,” she returned scornfully.
“Not by a d——d sight,” he burst out; “but I care for HIS! I'm not goin' to let any man call him a bastard!”
Callous as she had become even under this last cruel blow, she could not but see something in his coarse eyes she had never seen before; could not but hear something in his brutal voice she had never heard before! Was it possible that somewhere in the depths of his sordid nature he had his own contemptible sense of honor? A hysterical feeling came over her hitherto passive disgust and scorn, but it disappeared with his next sentence in a haze of anxiety. “No!” he said hoarsely, “he had enough wrong done him already.”