He looked a little defiant.
“Of course,” said Mary, “I know you wouldn’t come to an opinion”—she smiled with the same restless glance—“until you had made all the inquiries necessary. It mu—must—be a delightful place. Doctor?”
Her eyes shone blue as the sky.
“I wouldn’t send a convict to such a place,” said Dr. Sevier.
Richling flamed up.
“Don’t you think,” he began to say with visible restraint and a faint, ugly twist of the head,—“don’t you think it’s a better place for a poor man than a great, heartless town?”
“This isn’t a heartless town,” said the Doctor.
“He doesn’t mean it as you do, Doctor,” interposed Mary, with alarm. “John, you ought to explain.”
“Than a great town,” said Richling, “where a man of honest intentions and real desire to live and be useful and independent; who wants to earn his daily bread at any honorable cost, and who can’t do it because the town doesn’t want his services, and will not have them—can go”— He ceased, with his sentence all tangled.
“No!” the Doctor was saying meanwhile. “No! No! No!”