"Do I care?"
With a jerk and a tug, Dorothea dragged her long tresses out of Louisa's hands, and buried her face on the dressing-table. Gaunt and patient, Louisa waited behind her chair. Her sympathies were divided; she found it hard to believe harm of a man, a mere bachelor man, who kept his house so scrupulously clean.
"It's a wicked thing you're after, miss, though I suppose it's no use me saying so," she remarked dispassionately.
"It is not wicked! It's justice. That's all I want: to make him answer to the law for what he's done. I wouldn't touch him with a pitchfork myself!"
"But look at the nasty underhanded way of it, miss! Mascarooning as if you wasn't married, and you the way you been last year and all—it ain't hardly decent, to my mind. It makes me sick to see him hangin' on your footsteps, so to speak, and you leadin' him on. And it's my belief it's a wild mare's nest you got in your head, and him a babe unborn all the time; and then where'll you be?"
"Where I was before, of course. If it's so I shall find it out, and no harm done."
"No harm, with him trustin' the very ground you tread on, and then coming all of a jolt on the truth—"
"Oh, I can't go into all that," said Dorothea impatiently. "I didn't ask him to admire me, did I? It was he began it. I never dreamed of such a thing. Besides, I'm right, I know I am, and so would you if you'd been there. He did it. He's accountable for two lives, and one of them so innocent, so innocent—You know what Guy did for me, what he saved me from; how do you think I could ever face him or my baby again if I let them go unavenged?"
"It's not in heaven you'll be meeting that dear little innocent, nor never seeing her no more—"
"Oh, be quiet, Louisa!" Dorothea stamped; "Put Uncle Jack's stars in my hair," she ordered. "And I'll not wear that old black thing to-night. I'll have the silver brocade."