"Very well, Griselda," I said. "I have no secrets to hide from you. And this man has betrayed what he can never hope to hide. Pendleton, what do you mean to do?"
"Do—" muttered Pendleton, with a dark abstraction in his look, "I'd like to tell you what I'd like to do to such as you—but it isn't worth while. This namby-pamby, mollycoddle, rotten doll-life favors you. Do! If I had the money, I'd get so far away I couldn't even think of insects like you."
"Then you realize you are no more fit to take Laura's children than you're fit to live among decent people?" He was silent for a moment, with the abstraction merging into cunning in his eye, and that in turn, as though cunning were of no avail, fading into heaviness.
"They'll become like you," he finally answered with the somber trace of a sneer. "There's the oldest boy—I wish—I'd make a man of him." A snort of derision from Griselda interrupted.
"You mean a criminal," I put in, in spite of myself. "Well, you can't, Pendleton. Lift a finger and as surely as you sit there, I'll prosecute you—children or no children. Don't forget I have witnesses."
He gazed at me open-mouthed with half-defiance, half-alarm on his moist fleshy countenance.
"That's your little scheme, is it?" he muttered sardonically.
"Only if you drive me to it!"
"Blackmail, eh?"
I laughed at him. "What's the use of being melodramatic, Pendleton? You are hardly the one to talk like that."