"You may take your dyin' oath I won't." He was bitterly sarcastic. "Strite, an' no kid, didn't you know when you done—that—I'd never forgive you as long as I lived?"
He plucked the stout package of letters signed "Fare Air" from his indignant bosom, and threw them at her feet, with the new pipe, her hapless gift. His wrath was infinitely more terrible than she had imagined. Her tongue clave to the roof of her mouth. Everything kep' a-spinnin' so, she couldn't 'ardly tell whether she was on 'er 'ead or 'er 'eels. She will remember that day to the last breath she draws....
"Didn't you know it?" the voice of her judge demanded again.
John Tow, finding himself no longer an object of attention, had discreetly vanished.
"Oh, I did, I did!" Her agony was frantic. "Oh, let me go away and hide and die somewhere! Oh, crooil, to break a pore gal's 'art! Wot—wot loves the bloomin' earth under your feet!"
"Garn!"—the scorn of W. Keyse was something awful—"you an' your love——"
She wrenched the cotton lace away from her thin throat, and tore some of her hair out in the strenuous hysteria of her class, and screamed at him:
"Me an' my love!... Go on!... Frow it in me face, an' 'ave no pity! Me an' my love!... Sneer at it, take an' spit on it—ain't it yours all the syme? Oh, for Gawd's syke forgive me!"
He struck an indomitable attitude and thundered:
"So 'elp me Jiminy Cripps, I never will!"