"And what do you get out of this?" she asked, unexpectedly. "Mr. Inglesby is to get me, I am to get his money and a package of letters, my father is to get time to save himself; well then, what do you get? The pleasure of doing something wrong? Revenge?"
But Hunter looked at her with cold astonishment. "You surprise me," he said. "You talk as if you'd been going to see too many of those insufferable screen-plays that make the proletariat sniffle and the intelligent swear. I am merely a business man, Miss Eustis, and attending to this particular affair for my employer is all in the course of the day's work. I—er—am not in a position to refuse to obey orders or to be captious, particularly since Mr. Inglesby has agreed to double my present salary. That in itself is no light inducement—but I get more. I get Mr. Inglesby's personal backing, which means an assured future to me; as it will mean to you and your father, if you have got the sense you were born with. This is business. Kindly omit melodrama—crude, and not at all your style, really," he finished, critically.
"This is nothing short of villainy. And not at all too crude for your style," said Mary Virginia.
He laughed good-humoredly. "Bad temper is vastly becoming to you," he told her. "It gives you a magnificent color."
And at that Mary Virginia looked at him with eyes in which the shadow of fear was deepening. Hard as nails, cold as ice, to him she was merely a means to an end. He did not even hate her. The guillotine does not hate those whom it decapitates, either; none the less it takes off their heads once they get in the way of the descending knife.
"I suggest," said Hunter, rising, "that you go home now and think the matter over carefully. Weigh what you and your father stand to gain against what you stand to lose. I do not press you for an immediate decision. You shall have a reasonable time for consideration." It was a threat and a command, thinly veiled.
All that night, unable to sleep, she did think the matter over carefully; she turned and twisted it about and about and saw it now from this angle and now from that; and the more she studied it in all its bearings the worse it grew. There was no escape from it.
Suppose, although she knew she could never, never hope to satisfactorily explain them, she nevertheless told her father about those letters and the part they were to be made play, now that his own affairs had reached a crisis? She could fancy herself telling him that he must shield himself behind her skirts if he would save himself from ruin. That ... to James Eustis!
Suppose that the Carolina trigger-finger slipped, as Hunter had nonchalantly admitted might happen: what then? But it is the woman in the case who always suffers the most and the longest; it is the woman, always, who pays the greater price. Her fears magnified the imagined evil, her pride was crucified.
What tortured her most was that they were actually making her party to a wreck that could easily be averted. Hunter had admitted that Eustis could weather the storm, if he were given time. Oh, to gain time for him, then! And she lay there, staring into the dark with wet eyes. How could she help him, she who was also snared?