Symes rose in sudden excitement and paced the floor.
He believed it was! The belief grew to conviction and he dropped again into his chair. If this was it he need expect no quarter. As his thoughts flashed back over the past the fact began to stand out clearly that nearly every unfriendly act he had shown the girl had been instigated by Doctor Harpe and accomplished through Augusta.
"That woman!" The veins swelled in his temples. "Always that woman!" and as though in answer to her name he saw her pass the window and shake the latched door.
"Let me in!" It was a peremptory demand.
Symes threw the catch back hard.
"Yes, Dr. Harpe, I'll let you in. I've business with you. For the first time in my life I want to see you." His tone was brutal. "Sit down!" He laid his huge hand upon her shoulder and thrust her into a chair.
Towering above her in the red-faced, loud-voiced fury of a man who has lost his self-control, he shouted:
"I want you to get out! To quit! To leave this town! Twenty-four hours I'll give you to get your traps together. Do you hear? If you don't, so help me God, I'll put you where you belong! Don't speak," he raised his hand as though to forestall her, "lest I forget your sex." He went on, inarticulate with passion: "I've protected you as long as I can—as long as I'm going to. Do you understand? I'm done. I've got some little self-respect left; not much, but enough to see me through this. And you can tell Augusta Symes that if she wants to go, every door is open wide! Tell her—tell her that for me!"
He stopped, choked with the violence of his feelings, and in the pause which followed she sat looking up at him unmoved. The shock seemed to quiet her. Then, too, it was so like another scene indelibly engraved upon her memory that she wanted to laugh—actually to laugh. Yet Symes's violence cut her less than had the cool, impersonal voice of the coroner back there in that little Nebraska town. She found his blazing eyes far easier to meet than the cold unfriendliness in the gaze of the man who had delivered that other ultimatum. Perhaps it was because she believed she had less to fear. Symes dared not—dared not, she told herself—enforce his threats.
Symes read something of this thought in her face and it maddened him. Was it not possible to make her comprehend? Was she really so callous, so thick-skinned that she was immune from insult? His hand dropped once more upon her shoulder.