"I wish I had never interested myself in the matter," she says, angrily, vexed with herself, and with him, and with everything.
"Perhaps your wisdom would have lain in that direction," returns he, coolly. "But as you did interest yourself, and as victory lies with you, you should be the one to rejoice."
"Well, I don't," she says impulsively. And then she looks at him in a half-defiant, half-penitent, wholly charming way, letting her large soft eyes speak for her, as they rest full upon his face. There is something in her fresh young beauty almost irresistible. Guy, with an angry sigh, acknowledges its power, and going nearer to her, takes both her clasped hands in his.
"What a bad-tempered little girl you are!" he says, in a jesting tone, that is still full of the keenest reproach. "Am I as bad as Brutus and all those terrible Medes and Persians? I confess you made me tremble when you showered upon me all those awful comparisons."
"No, no, I was wrong," she says, hastily, twining her small fingers closely round his; then very softly, "You are always forgiving me, are you not? But yet—tell me, Guardy—are you not really glad you have pardoned that poor Heskett? I cannot be pleased about it myself so long as I think I have only wrung your promise from you against your will. Say you are glad, if only to make me happy."
"I would do anything to make you happy,—anything," he says, in a strange tone, reading anxiously her lovely riante face, that shows no faintest trace of such tenderness as he would fain see there; then, altering his voice with an effort, "Yes, I believe I am glad," he says, with a short laugh: "your intercession has removed a hateful duty from my shoulders."
"Where is the boy? Is he locked up, or confined anywhere?"
"Nowhere. I never incarcerate my victims," with a slight trace of bitterness still in his manner. "He is free as air, in all human probability poaching at this present moment."
"But if he knows there is punishment in store for him, why doesn't he make his escape?"
"You must ask him that, because I cannot answer the question. Perhaps he does not consider me altogether such a fiend as you do, and may think it likely I will show mercy at the last moment."