“There, that’s enough,” said Williams. “Going round and round in a circle won’t help any of us, and you ought to know by this time, Elsie, that I always mean what I say. You’ll please to remember what you were when I married you—a little fool of a typist, without a penny, whose mother kept a boarding-house and was only too glad of the money I gave her. It doesn’t take a genius to say what would have happened to you if you hadn’t found a man fool enough to marry you, either.”
“Stop that!” Morrison shouted.
The solicitor blinked at him quietly. “I’ve twice told you to get out of my house,” he observed. “Don’t make me say it a third time. It’ll be the worse, if you do—for Elsie.”
“Are you threatening her, you—you brute, you?”
“I object to your friendship with my wife. That’s all—and enough too. Now go.”
“Oh yes, go!” said Elsie suddenly, breaking into renewed sobs and tears. “I can’t stand this. You’d better go, Leslie boy, really you had. I shall do myself in, that’s all.”
“Don’t talk like that——” the youth began frantically, but Williams opened the door, and stood silently pointing to it.
There was something strangely inexorable in his little, trivial figure and sinister, passionless expression.
“Elsie,” said Morrison brokenly, “if ever you want me, send for me. I’ll come!”
He went out of the room, and they heard him go down the stairs and let himself out at the front door.