"But you must read it," she cried. "If you don't I—oh, I won't send it. I couldn't. Don't make me sorry I asked this favour. It is so little to you, and—and it means so much to me."
She stood waiting, but Bull showed no sign of yielding. He was thinking of the man, Peterman. He remembered his good-looking Teutonic face, and the favour with which Nancy had seemed to regard him. A smouldering jealousy had suddenly blazed up within him.
Nancy turned away in desperation. She moved to depart.
"I'm sorry," she said. And even in her trouble there was a coldness in her tone no less than his.
Bull choked down his feelings.
"Please don't go," he cried, urgently. "It would please me very much to have that message sent. Say, I wasn't thinking the way you reckoned. I wasn't thinking of the message at all."
"Then you will read it?" The girl came back readily.
"Why should I?" Bull asked smilingly. "Say, a friend asking me to send a message for him, a message no concern of mine, what would you think, what would he feel, if I demanded to read its contents?"
He ran the fingers of one hand through his mane of hair and stood smiling down into the girl's pretty eyes.
"You know this thing makes me want to talk. I've just got to talk. The position's sort of impossible as it stands. Maybe you don't guess the thing I'm feeling, and maybe I don't just know how it is with you. We've got to talk right out and show down our hands. If we don't—"