"Not to that," said Harry quietly. "We shall touch the bottom of the flour sack to-morrow. You expect to get your meals here, I presume."
"I still look forward to that pleasure," answered Prendergast with an evil sneer. "Three meals a day and a rotten roof over my head. When I think of the little I have done to deserve it, the hospitality overcomes me! All I have done is to keep you from starving to death and out of quod at the same time. I only taught you a safe way to beat the game—an easier one than you seem to know now—and to live on Easy Street!"
"I am looking for no easy way," responded Harry, "whatever you mean by that. I expect to earn my living as I'm earning it now—it's an honest method, at all events."
"You've grown all-fired particular since you lost your memory," retorted Prendergast, his eyes narrowing. "You'll be turning dominie one of these days! Perhaps you expect to get the town to take up with you, and to make love to the beauty in the green riding-habit that brought you here on her horse the night you were out of your head!"
Harry started. "What do you mean?" he asked thickly.
Prendergast's oily manner was gone now. His savage temper came uppermost.
"I forgot you didn't know about that," he scoffed. "I made a neat story of it in the town. They've been gabbling about it ever since."
Harry caught his breath. As through a mist he saw again that green habit on the hotel balcony—that face that had haunted his waking consciousness. It had not been Prendergast alone, then, who had brought him here. And her act of charity had been made, no doubt, a thing for the tittering of the town, cheapened by chatter, coarsened by joke!
"I wonder if she'd done it if she'd known all I know," continued the other malevolently. "You'd better go up to the sanatorium, Hugh, and give her a nice sweet kiss for it!"
A lust of rage rose in Harry's throat, but he choked it down. His hand fell like iron on Prendergast's shoulder, and turned him forcibly toward the open door. His other hand pointed, and his suppressed voice said: