The man's eyes met the girl's incredulously.
"How can you talk that way?" he demanded roughly. "I didn't know a thing then. I thought she was all she seemed. Maybe I was just a blind fool, crazy with love. Anyway—I hadn't learned the hell lying around her heart."
"I s'pose there is hell lying around her heart?"
Nan's words were provocative. Yet they were spoke in such a tone of simplicity as to rob them of all apparent intent.
Jeff was in no mood for patience. Swift resentment followed upon his incredulous stare.
"Do you need me to give it you all again?" he cried fiercely. "It don't need savvee to grip things." Then his voice rose. "And to think those dollars have fed her, and clothed her, a body as fair as an angel's, and a heart as foul as hell." Then his tone dropped as if he were afraid of the sound of his own voice. "Say, thank God I kept my hands off her. If she'd been a man——"
He left his sentence unfinished. In her mind Nan completed it. But aloud she gave it another ending.
"If she'd been a man I don't guess she'd have been there to have you lay hands on her."
There was a new note in the girl's tones. But it passed Jeff by.
"No," he said with almost foolish seriousness.