“And don’t swear, lest you add the breaking of your oath to your other sins. What we’ve got to do is to stick to our story, stick to the girl, and stick to the money. We must have no scandals. That would be to court inquiries. Do you know that Pickett’s man who gave me a lift in the trap to Hastings asked me if we kept a wild animal in the enclosed wood. He said his master had heard strange, unearthly sounds from our place. You know what that was. There must be no more of it.”
This piece of information went far towards thoroughly sobering Thomas Alvin.
“What a fool I am!” he muttered. “What a fool I have always been! I was born cursed! I shall die a violent death.”
Mrs. Le Breton jeered.
“Then it won’t be by your own hand,” she told him. “You are too much of a coward.”
He looked at her with fierce eyes in which hate shone.
“It was for calling me that that I struck the girl,” he said.
“But you daren’t strike me,” she reminded him. “You only dare attack what can’t defend itself.”
From which conversation the reader will gather that there was not much affection between the plotters.
Mrs. Le Breton, however, was not a creature to be cowed by a bully. Misery had taught her courage, while it had made her cruel. She had not always been what she was now.