"Oh, why didn't you stay away, when once you had gone?" she asked. "It would have been far kinder to me."
"I begin to understand now why you were so anxious to have me go," he said. "Probably you feared I would make trouble. Did you think I might attempt to harm your youthful, handsome lover?" he asked, sneeringly. "No wonder you only cared to talk of the present, not of the future that night we parted. No wonder you parried my questions when I asked if you would some day come to me. I marveled then at your strange silence, but the reason is now as clear as day. All the while you were urging me to go away, you were expecting to marry him after I had gone! Confess now—wasn't your word given to him before I went away?"
"Yes," acknowledged Sally, "but let me explain a few things you do not understand, I"—
"It is unnecessary," quickly interrupted Milt. "Those things I do understand are all-sufficient for me. You wanted me away from here, and you succeeded in getting me to go—you preferred the Squire's money to my poverty, and you are on the eve of getting his money, too. Perhaps you are in league with those rascals who may have meant only to frighten me, and cause me to run away, like a cowardly cur. They might not have harmed me—I doubt now if they intended to.
"It is not too late, though, to thwart your plans and his," continued the speaker with increasing anger. "You are not yet married to that brute, and, by heaven! you shall not be! I swear it! I will kill him first—the scoundrel! the hound!" he cried passionately, overswept by the rage that swayed him, like a tree twisted by the storm.
"Milt, Milt, don't talk that way! You mustn't harm him! You shall not!" cried the girl, terror-stricken by the passionate utterances of her companion.
Her words were but fuel to the flame. They goaded him into a sort of frenzy.
"So you beg for him, do you? You don't want him hurt—your lover, your husband that is soon to be. By heaven! I'll wring his wrinkled, villainous neck like I would a chicken's, d—n him. He's driven me from his roof, he's taken you from me, but I'll even up old scores at last."
As the maddened man started up the road, Sally frantically caught hold of him, striving to pacify his anger, to reason with him, to make him understand his unjustness toward her, but he roughly shook himself free, and moved the faster.
"Milt! Milt! come back!" she cried entreatingly, but he made no answer, and hurried on.