Suddenly she sank to her knees beside his chair, clasping both hands over one of his.
'He is a wicked man!' she cried passionately. 'I hate him!'
Jerry rose hurriedly, lifting her as he did so.
'Speak lower. You should not have come,' he said.
'Why shouldn’t I come?' Rosita faltered, tears on her long lashes, her lips quivering like a child’s. 'You are alone and in trouble.'
'Beastly trouble! It is awfully kind of you. By Jove!' he exclaimed, his outraged sense of propriety yielding place to a yet more wounded sense of his friends' desertion in this time of need; 'you are the only one of the lot who cares what happens to any fellow after he is down.'
'It isn’t "any fellow." I care for you, Jerry,' she murmured wistfully. 'But he cannot hurt you, really? Just for to-night?'
'To-night!' he repeated, while discretion fled the field, routed by the rush of a vision of the probable consequences of his wrongs which swept over his soul. 'He intends to destroy my whole career. And he will do it, too, for I shall never apologize to him!'
Sympathy is none the less sweet when it shines in brilliant eyes, and he was not much more than a boy—a boy aghast in the presence of his first trouble. He grew eloquent while he described the gloomy future which Pryor’s tyranny stretched before him.
'The long and short of it is that I am ruined through his confounded jealousy'—