She started violently.
“You—you struck him down? He—he is dying?” Her voice trailed off into a whisper.
“He will be a long time in dying. It will be slow. I struck him down, not with my hand, not with a weapon that he could parry, but with words—words! Do you hear? I have crushed his soul with words!”
“Oh, you coward!” she cried, leaning over the table, her eyes blazing. “I can understand it in you. You have no soul of your own. What have you done to your son, James Brood?”
He drew back as if from the impact of a blow. “Coward? If I have crushed his soul, it was done in time, Yvonne, to deprive you of the glory of doing it.”
“What did he say to you about me?”
“You have had your fears for nothing. He did not put you in jeopardy,” he said scornfully.
“I know. He is not a coward,” she said calmly.
“In your heart you are reviling me. You judge me as one guilty soul judges another. Suppose that I were to confess to you that I left him up there with all the hope, all the life blasted out of his eyes—with a wound in his heart that will never stop bleeding—that I left him because I was sorry for what I had done and could not stand by and look upon the wreck I had created. Suppose———”
“I am still thinking of you as a coward. What is it to me that you are sorry now? What have you done to that wretched, unhappy boy?”