"Let me be judge of that," she said.
"I have not even told you everything about tonight. When you hear what has happened, you won't want to speak to me again." She suddenly took out a little lace handkerchief and began to cry. He stared at her with haggard eyes. "Do you know that I have killed a man tonight?" he said sombrely.
That gave her pause. Her nerves went taut and her face rigid behind the scrap of lace. Even her cold soul balked at murder, and her plans of mingled revenge and self-advancement rocked a little. She looked at him direct now, with eyes full of horrified enquiry.
"I did not mean to distress you with the story," he said. "But I struck a man over the card-table, and they say he is dead."
It seemed to her that she caught a sound of relief, even triumph in the statement—almost as though he was glad to have such a reason for stemming the tide of her words, and not taking the clinging hands she put out to him. Her keen mind was on the alert instantly. What was at the bottom of it all? Perhaps the man was not dead. Perhaps this was just a little trick of Druro's to slip the toils he felt closing round his liberty—her toils! Being a trickster herself, she easily suspected trickery in others. Rapidly she turned the thing over in her mind. She had no intention of involving herself with a man who had got to pay the penalty for committing a crime—but nothing simpler for her than to repudiate him if anything so unpleasant should really arise. On the other hand, in case he was juggling with the truth, she must establish a hold, a bond that, being a man of honour, he would not be able to repudiate. The situation called for the exercise of all the finesse of which she was mistress. She put away her handkerchief and looked at him gravely.
"There must be some dreadful mistake."
He shrugged his shoulders rather wearily.
"I don't think so." His manner inferred, "And I don't much care, either."
"But you must care," she said urgently. "You must fight it, Lundi. If you won't do it for your own sake"—she came a step nearer to him—"I ask you to do it for mine." He was staring moodily into the gloom of the night and the deeper gloom of his own soul. "To make up to me for the humiliation you have put upon me tonight," she said, almost in a whisper, "I think I have a right to claim so much."
That jerked him from his dreams. He looked her straight in the eyes.