He laughed harshly.
“I!” he exclaimed, with a sudden touch of real and fierce bitterness which brought the light dancing into her eyes and a spot of colour to her cheeks. “I preserve you! Why, you can never hear my name without thinking of sin, of crime of some sort! Do you seriously expect me to ever preserve any one from anything?”
“You haven't made any very violent attempts to corrupt me,” she reminded him.
“Women don't enter much into my scheme of life,” he declared. “They played a great part once. It was a woman, I think, who first headed me off from the pastures of virtue.”
“I know,” she said softly. “It was Margaret's mother.”
His voice rang out like a pistol-shot.
“How did you know that?”
She turned away from the rail and threw herself back in her chair. His hand, however, she still kept in hers.
“Uncle Joe was Minister at Rio, you know, the year it all happened,” she explained. “He told us the story years ago—how you came back from Europe and found things were not just as they should be between Margaret's mother and your partner, and how you killed your partner.”
His nostrils quivered a little. One felt that the fire of suffering had touched him again for a moment.