“Yes,” he said. “It's like this, Keith. There's a girl I've known for some months now—”
Women! And Keith said between his teeth: “Well?”
“Her father was a Pole who died over here when she was sixteen, and left her all alone. A man called Walenn, a mongrel American, living in the same house, married her, or pretended to—she's very pretty, Keith—he left her with a baby six months old, and another coming. That one died, and she did nearly. Then she starved till another fellow took her on. She lived with him two years; then Walenn turned up again, and made her go back to him. The brute used to beat her black and blue, all for nothing. Then he left her again. When I met her she'd lost her elder child, too, and was taking anybody who came along.”
He suddenly looked up into Keith's face.
“But I've never met a sweeter woman, nor a truer, that I swear. Woman! She's only twenty now! When I went to her last night, that brute—that Walenn—had found her out again; and when he came for me, swaggering and bullying—Look!”—he touched a dark mark on his forehead—“I took his throat in my hands, and when I let go—”
“Yes?”
“Dead. I never knew till afterwards that she was hanging on to him behind.”
Again he made that gesture-wringing his hands.
In a hard voice Keith said:
“What did you do then?”