"Too bad you don't smoke, Jude," Gaston said quietly, refilling his pipe. "But sit down, and loosen your collar. The room is infernally close. I've been thinking some of leaving St. Angé—"
"When are you going?" Jude broke in with an eagerness that intensified the smile on Gaston's face, and bade the devil in him awake. The same devil that in boyhood days had made him such an irritant to the bullies of his class.
"Oh, I'm not going," he replied, puffing luxuriously upon his pipe; "I've changed my mind. All I wanted was new scenes and occupations. I've decided to stay on awhile. But I've been thinking, Jude, you don't want to take Joyce into your shack. Let's build her another up on the sunny slope beyond the Long Meadow on the Hillcrest side. I'm gaining strength each year; I like to keep myself busy and the work would be a godsend to me. What do you say? I can lend you a little money, too, if you need it."
Need it? Unconsciously Gaston had touched the spring that unlocked the evilest part of Jude's nature. Jealousy, love, hate, were blotted out by this unlooked-for suggestion. His dark face flushed and his dull eyes gleamed. Money! Money! To handle it, spend it and enjoy it without great bodily effort in earning it. This had ever been a consuming passion with Jude. A passion that had remained smouldering because no favouring chance had ever fanned it. Lazy and hot-blooded, Jude, in a prosperous community, might have developed criminal tendencies young; in St. Angé there had been nothing to tempt him—until now.
"Thank you," he said, and Gaston saw the change in him. "I—I may be glad of a small loan—just at the start, you know, and before I get my pay from the camp boss. It's almighty kind of you, Mr. Gaston, to think of this here building and all. Me and Joyce will take it grateful, I can tell you."
"Going?" Gaston asked, for Jude had risen and was awkwardly shifting from foot to foot. "Well, so long! Good luck—and a speedy marriage."
Then the door closed upon the transformed Jude.
"Now, what in thunder," mused Gaston in the hot, smoky room, "has got into that fellow, I wonder!" Could they know of his money? The amount, and manner of getting it? Was he, in offering Jude this assistance, letting the leak in upon his own safety?
A cloud gathered on Gaston's face. A sensation of coming evil possessed him. He felt as if, in an unguarded moment, he had given an enemy a power over him.
The memory of the look in Jude's face when the money cast a gleam over his hate, repelled him. Gaston was as fully alive to the possibilities now as Jude was—perhaps more so; but there stood the pale, innocent girl between them. He recalled her hurt, quivering face when he had urged her into Jude's keeping. It had seemed her only salvation—hers and his! But it began to look now like a hideous damnation.