Then her rage and misery broke forth.
“Yer a coward!” she said, with gasps between her words. “Yer afraid! I'd sooner—I'd sooner ye'd killed me—dead!”
Her voice shrilled itself into a smothered shriek, she cast herself face downward upon the earth and lay there clutching amid her sobs at the grass.
He looked down at her in a cold, stunned fashion.
“Do you think,” he said hoarsely, “that you can loathe me as I loathe myself? Do you think you can call me one shameful name I don't know I deserve? If you can, for God's sake let me have it.”
She struck her fist against the earth.
“Thar wasn't a man I ever saw,” she said, “that didn't foller after me, 'n' do fur me, 'n' wait fur a word from me. They'd hev let me set my foot on 'em if I'd said it. Thar wasn't nothin' I mightn't hev done—not nothin'. An' now—an' now “—and, she tore the grass from its earth and flung it from her.
“Go on,” he said. “Go on and say your worst.”
Her worst was bad enough, but he almost exulted under the blows she dealt him. He felt the horrible sting a vague comfort. He had fallen low enough surely when it was a comfort to be told that he was a liar, a poltroon, and a scoundrel.
The sun had been down an hour when it was over and she had risen and taken up her bundle.