"You jeer at me. You are always jeering. You know not what you say."
"That is good--from you. Your style of conversation may have been suited to Strikehigh City, where they all were lunatics. But in London it is out of place."
"London!--bah!"
He threw out his arms, as if to put the idea of London clean behind him.
"Precisely. Then if it's London!--bah! Why don't you return to Strikehigh City?"
"I will finish the work which I came to do. Then I will return."
I had sat down on an easy-chair. I had crossed my legs, and was swinging my foot in the air. Old Haines stood glowering down at me, clenching his fists to hold his temper in. I looked him up and down. After all he was, every inch of him, a narrow-minded, cross-grained, hidebound New Englander.
"You are more likely to see the inside of a prison if you don't take care. You know, they manage things differently upon this side. Jack Haines, let me speak to you a word in season--a candid word. It may do you good. You killed your wife; I do not mean legally, but you killed her all the same. A prolonged course of you would be sufficient to kill any wife."
"Woman!"
"You drove your daughter from you. So unwilling was she to have it known that she was connected with you, that she took her mother's name. She called herself Louise O'Donnel. Under that name she came to England. Conscious that, even underneath her mother's name, you might trace her out in England, she has changed her name again. Under that new name she is deliberately hiding herself away from you."