“I won’t have it on my conscience that I have been a party to this break between you two. If it were not so dreadful it would be silly, sir.”
“I have the right to be silly about my own business, if you’re bound to call it silly, what I have done.”
“Go back, I tell you!”
“I will not!”
“You shall not walk away with me.”
“I invited you to come up here. I shall see you to the door of that tavern. You may never speak to me again, but you won’t be able to say about me that I deserted you in the dark night.”
“Will you come back here after you have escorted me to the tavern?”
“No! It’s settled into a stand-off between Flagg and me.”
“Don’t you want to please me?”
“Yes, even to lying down here in the mud and letting you walk on me,” he declared, his fervor breaking from the repression he had been maintaining with difficulty. “And it’s because he has insulted somebody that I feel like that toward—that’s why I’m done with him. I’m not putting it very smoothly. But it’s in here!” He pounded his fist on his breast.