“Do you mean this, Eweretta? You will never attempt to—”
“I have already told you,” interrupted Eweretta. “Let me come and go as other girls; it is all I ask. Why should I be kept a prisoner? You have my fortune, and I shall not interfere with you.”
Alvin stared at the girl as if he could not believe his senses. At last he spoke.
“It shall be as you say, Eweretta,” he said. “But if you play me false—well, you know me.”
“I shall not play you false,” she said simply, “and from now never use the name Eweretta again, or you will betray yourself.”
As she spoke she glanced over the garden hedge.
“Look,” she said, “and you will see why I must never rise from the dead.”
Philip Barrimore and Phyllis Lane were crossing the field, walking towards Pickett’s Farm. Phyllis had her arm linked through Philip’s.
Then Alvin understood.
Perhaps the first real pity he had ever felt for a human creature possessed him just then. From his earliest infancy his hand had been against everyone and everyone’s hand against him. Ill-luck had dogged his every step and embittered him. He had come to think himself a sport of the gods. All tenderness had been strangled in its birth. “Tooth and claw, tooth and claw,” he had told himself; there was nothing else for him. And he had stolen this girl’s fortune. He had wrecked her life. He had treated her brutally.