"The balance will enable you to rub along for a time. If you take my tip, you'll let Pendarvon have his coin at once--before leaving town."
He took the cheque. Scanning the figures, he began to fold it up with nervous fingers. A smile--of a kind--wrinkled his lips.
"What things we may become! If ever there was blood money, this is it. And I'm a Beaupré. And do you know, Townsend, that for ever so long I've been dreaming dreams." He looked up at me, with a sudden flashing of his eyes. "Dreams of Dora Jardine."
I turned again to the fire--smiling in my turn.
"You told me so before."
"But I never told you what sort of dreams I had been dreaming. I never told you how she fills all my veins till, in all the world, I see nothing, think of nothing else, but her. I never told you how she is with me by day and by night, sleeping and waking; that, wherever I am, and whatever I do, I am always repeating to myself her name. I never told you that the dreams which I have dreamed of her have driven me mad. I never told you that."
"With all due respect to you, I should hardly have believed you if you had."
"Why? Because I am the thing I am? There's the pity of it! I have been so conscious of my unworthiness, so conscious that I never could be worthy, that, constrained by some madness which I verily believe is in my blood, I have become more unworthy still." He came closer to me. His voice dropped to a sort of breathless whisper. "And yet, Reggie, do you know, I believe that, in spite of all, she cares for me."
"I think not."
He became, all at once, almost ferocious.