“Bless her pretty, white fingers!” she murmured.
“I’ll not have her hurt!” he repeated, with vehemence. “I’ve done her harm enough.”
“Not so much harm as you would have done her, if you’d had your way!” she replied. And her face grew hard. “But now she’s to be sacred, is she? Her ladyship’s pretty, white fingers are not to be pinched—if you swing for it! Very well! It’s your neck will be pulled, not mine.”
He fidgeted on his stool, but he did not answer. His eyes roved round the bare miserable room, with its low ceiling, its deep shadows, and its squalor. At last:
“What do you mean?” he asked querulously. “Why can’t you speak plain?”
“I thought I had spoken plain enough,” she replied. “But if she’s not to be touched, there’s an end of it.”
“What would you do?”
“What I said—shut her mouth.”
He shuddered and his face, already sallow from long confinement, grew greyer.
“No,” he said, “I’ll not do it.”