“Done to me! If you have forgotten ten years ago, and the way you deceived me, Allynne Markworth, I have not!”
“Good God, Clara! I thought that was all past and gone. No one could have regretted it more than I! and you, yourself, said we had better let bygones be bygones! Why, you accepted money from me, you—”
“Yes, I did! It was only to work your own ruin!”
“Good God, Clara! Don’t go on like that; I’m hunted down now, or I would do anything you wanted. Don’t hit a man when he’s down!”
She still continued, working herself up into a frenzy of passion as she spoke, without noticing his words, although gazing steadily in his face with her basilisk eyes, which were widened with fury and hate.
“Do you know that if that flaw had not been discovered in the date of the girl’s age—and I only wish that I had made it and discovered it!—and that if your case had gone to trial, I would have come forward as evidence against you, and would have sworn to having assisted you to abduct that poor idiot Susan Hartshorne? Do you know that I would have sworn to this, no matter how I implicated myself, only to get you ruined? Did you ever think of that?”
“No, for God’s sake, Clara! I kept to my bargain.”
“Did you keep your bargain ten years ago? If you forget, Allynne Markworth, I do not! Now, thank God, I have got you caught at last!”
“Have you, you she devil, fiend!” he said, “You will be baulked again, my lady! Don’t make too sure! curse you, she cat! What do you come here to torment me for?”
“What do I come for, eh? I told you before—to see you caged at last—you deceiver! swindler! murderer!” she hissed between her teeth. “Ha! does not that touch you up at last? You will get out, will you! Do you forget Havre? Do you forget Susan Hartshorne, the same as you forgot me once before? Have you forgotten the murder I saw, murderer? Ah!”