"Peste!" he answered after a pause of sheer astonishment at her audacity. "What is it to you, you slut?"
"Why, a dog's life too! and not of my choice!" she cried passionately, her voice breaking. "What am I better, as I live, than an orange girl in the streets? What do I get, and walk the pavement on your errands night and day? What do I get? And always hiding and sneaking, hiding and sneaking! And for what?"
"For your living, yon beggarly baggage!" he roared. "Who feeds you and clothes you, you graceless hussy? Who boards you and lodges you, and finds you in meat and malt, you feckless toad? You shameless----"
"Ay, call names!" she answered bitterly--and it was not hard to discern that she was beside herself with the long sick waiting and the disappointment. "It is what you are good for! It is all that your plots end in! Call names, and you are happy! But I am tired, and tired of it, I tell you. I am tired of bare boards and hiding, and all for what? For those that, when you have brought them back, you will be as fierce to oust as you are now to restore! And shameless it is you call me?" she continued with feverish rapidity. "Shameless? Have you not sent me out into the streets a hundred times, and close on midnight, and not a thought or care what would happen to me so long as your letter went safe? Have you not sent me where to be taken was to be jailed and whipped, and not a thought of pity or what a life it was for a girl? Have you not done this and more?" she continued, breathless with passion. "And more? And yet you take praise for feeding me! And call me graceless and shameless----"
She paused and gave him room to speak, but though he put on a show of bluster it was evident her violence alarmed him. "Odd's name, and what is all this?" he said. "What ails the girl? What has set you up now, you vixen?"
"You!" she cried vehemently. "You and your trade!"
"Well," he said, with a sort of sullen reasonableness, "and what is the matter with the trade? What is wrong with the trade, I say? I'll tell you this, my lass, you would live badly without it."
"I would live honestly," she cried. "And as my father lived!"
"You drab!" he cried. "Leave that alone."
At that, and when judging from the tone of his voice I expected him to break out with fresh oaths and curses, there was instead an astonishing silence, which fell for me at an unlucky moment, for forgetting, in my desire to see as well as hear, the risk I ran, I had crept down the stairs, and now lacked but a pace of seeing into the room. The noise ceasing, I dared neither take that step nor retreat; and it was only when the silence had continued so long that curiosity overcame fear, that I ventured the advance, and looking in, saw that the girl, her fire and fury gone, was leaning against the wall beside the hearth, her face averted; while Ferguson himself, in an attitude of dejection scarcely less marked, stood near her, his head bowed and his blood-shot eyes fixed on the fire.