“Where is she?” he cried, starting up, with dishevelled hair and wild eyes.
“Who? Lady Marion?” asked Goodhare lightly.
“Lady Marion! No, d—— Lady Marion. I mean Deborah—my beautiful Deborah! I will see her—I must! If she will have me, I’ll give up all thoughts of that lanky caricature of a woman, beg her to forgive me, and marry her.”
“Too late, too late, my impulsive young friend. ‘Your’ beautiful Deborah is on her way back to Carstow, too utterly disgusted with you to give you another thought.”
“But, Goodhare, she did not understand. She is too pure, too good to believe that men can be such blackguards as you have made me. Let me go, I tell you, let me go!”
He struggled to pass Goodhare, who locked the door and put the key in his pocket.
“I am not going to have that poor girl insulted any more,” he said. “If she did not understand what you meant while she was with you, she did before she left London.”
“You infernal scoundrel! You told her! You explained to her! You have ruined and degraded me, and you wanted to make me ruin and degrade her!”
He flew at the elder man, who held him off with long, sinewy hands, as he could not have done before the once athletic young man had become weakened by excesses and dissipation.
“You degrade her! You degrade that girl!” said Amos, letting the contempt he felt for his poor tool shine for once full from his eyes; “women of her sort are not degraded by such as you, nor by such as I either. You have to marry Lady Marion. I had to bring that about by any means I could. That’s explanation enough. And now to business.”