An emphatic negative gesture frightened her.
“You don’t know him,” said Singleton, biting his lips. “He’s nearer being a devil than any other human being.” It was a feeling of bitterness, of the deadly wrong done him, that forced him to sarcasm. “The great—the good Jordan Morse—bah!” he sneered. “If he’s ‘good,’ so are fiends from perdition.”
He sent the last words out between his teeth as if he loathed the idea expressed in them. If they brought a sombre red to the girl’s cheeks, it was not because she did not have sympathy with him.
Sudden leaping flames of passion yellowed the man’s eyes, and he staggered up.
“May God damn the best in him! May all he loves wither and blight! May black Heaven break his heart––”
Jinnie sprang forward and clutched him fiercely by the 23 arm. “Don’t! Don’t!” she implored. “That’s awful, awful!”
Singleton sank back, brushing his foaming lips with the back of his hand.
“Well,” he muttered, “he followed me abroad and did for me over there!”
“Did for you?” Virginia repeated after him, parrot-like, gazing at him in a puzzled way as she sat down again.
“Yes, me! If I’d had any sense, I might have known his game. In the state of his finances he’d no business to come over at all. But I didn’t know until he got there how evil he was. Oh, God! I wish I had—but I didn’t, and now my only work left is to send you somewhere––Oh, why didn’t I know?”