“How can you talk to that man, my dear? I think he looks perfectly dreadful—hardly like a human being.”
“I was just telling him he ought to shave himself,” said Ella. “I told him I should like to know what he was really like.”
“I shall ask father,” said Mrs. Dawson sternly, “to make it a condition of his employment here.”
CHAPTER XVII. A DECLARATION
Dunn knew very well that he ought to give immediate information to the authorities of what had happened.
But he did not. He told himself that nothing could help poor John Clive, and that any precipitate action on his part might still fatally compromise his plans, which were now so near completion.
But his real reason was that he knew that if he came forward he would be very closely questioned, and sooner or later forced to tell the things he knew so terribly involving Ella.
And he knew that to surrender her to the police and proclaim her to the world as guilty of such things were tasks beyond his strength; though, to himself, with a touch of wildness in his thoughts, he said that no proved and certain guilt should go unpunished even though his own hand—It was a train of ideas he did not pursue.
“Charley Wright first and now John Clive,” he said to himself. “But the end is not yet.”