Furlonger's mouth was working with passion, and his eyes were deliriously bright. He really meant to wring Lowe's neck. He had forgotten his earlier schemes of vengeance—nothing would suffice him now but the extreme, the uttermost.
Lowe folded his arms across his chest, and called up all his memories of Tony.
"You want to kill me," he said in a struggling voice, "because of what I've done to Janey—but I tell you it's been a blessing to her as well as to me. We were both in the mud together, and now I've got out it'll be easier for her to do so."
"You've blighted her with your damned love!" cried Leonard incoherently, "she's half dead, she's in the mud, she's in hell. When you got out, as you call it, you kicked her deeper in."
"But there's no good killing me for it."
"Why?"
Len asked the question almost lamely. He felt giddy and inert, and Quentin's words seemed to be trickling past him somehow—it was a strange feeling he could not quite realise.
"Why?—because you'll probably be hanged for it, and that won't do your sister any good. Besides"—and here his voice quickened suddenly into passion—"you've no right to kill me for grasping my only chance of salvation."
"Damn your salvation!—I'm not going to kill you for getting out of the ditch, but for dragging her into it—Janey, my sister, whose shoes you aren't worthy to clean."
Lowe quailed for a moment. Furlonger's eyes were blazing, and he crouched back as if for a spring.