“That big blue machine that was to have killed me the other night,” he went on, stretching matters a little in so far as his own knowledge was concerned, “was all arranged for long before you came down here. I haven’t the slightest idea why you work for Tilney, but I know now that that’s what you’re doing, and I’m sick of you and the whole thing. You’re just a plain little crook, that’s all, and I’m through with you and this whole thing, and I don’t want you to talk to me any more. What’s more, I’m not going to leave this hotel, either, and you can take that news to Tilney if you want to, or Mrs. Skelton or whoever else is managing things here for him. I’ve kept a day-to-day record of everything that’s happened so far, and I have witnesses, and if anything more happens to me here I’m going to the newspapers and expose the whole thing. If you had any sense of decency left you wouldn’t be in on anything like this, but you haven’t—you’re just a shabby little trickster, and that lets you out, and that’s all I have to say.”
He stood up and made as if to walk off, while Miss Carle sat there, seemingly dazed, then jumped up and called after him:
“Mr. Gregory! Please! Please! Mr. Gregory, I want to tell you something!”
He stopped and turned. She came hurriedly up to him.
“Don’t go,” she pleaded, “not just yet. Wait a minute. Please come back. I want to talk to you.” And though he looked at her rather determinedly, he followed her.
“Well?” he asked.
“You don’t understand how it is,” she pleaded, with a look of real concern in her eyes. “And I can’t tell you either, just now, but I will some time if you will let me. But I like you, and I really don’t want to do you any harm. Really, I don’t. I don’t know anything about these automobile things you’re telling about—truly I don’t. They’re all terrible and horrible to me, and if they are trying to do anything like that, I don’t know it, and I won’t have anything more to do with it—really I won’t. Oh, it’s terrible!” and she clenched her hands. “I do know Mr. Diamondberg now, I admit that, but I didn’t before I came down here, and Mr. Swayne and Mr. Tilney. I did come here to see if I could get you interested in me, but they didn’t tell me just why. They told me—Mrs. Skelton did—that you, or some people whom you represented, were trying to get evidence against some friends of theirs—Mr. Tilney’s, I believe—who were absolutely innocent, that you weren’t happy with your wife, and that if some one, any one, were able to make you fall in love with her or just become very good friends, she might be able to persuade you not to do it, you see. There wasn’t any plan, so far as I know, to injure you bodily in any way. They didn’t tell me that they wanted to injure you physically—really they didn’t. That’s all news to me, and dreadful. All they said was that they wanted to get some one to get you to stop—make it worth your while in a money way, if I could. I didn’t think there was anything so very wrong in that, seeing all they have done for me in the past—Mr. Tilney, Mrs. Skelton and some others. But after I saw you a little while I——” she paused and looked at him, then away, “I didn’t think you were that kind of a man, you see, and so—well, it’s different now. I don’t want to do anything to hurt you. Really I don’t. I couldn’t—now.”
“So you admit now that you do know Mr. Tilney,” he commented sourly, but not without a sense of triumph behind it all.
“I just told you that,” she said.
She stopped, and Gregory stared at her suspiciously. That she liked him was plain, and in a sense it was different from that of a mere passing flirtation, and as for himself—well, he couldn’t help liking her in a genial way. He was free to admit that to himself, in spite of her trickery, and that she was attractive, and as yet she personally had not done anything to him, certainly nothing that he could prove. She seemed even now so young, although so sophisticated and wise, and much about her face, its smoothness, the delicate tracery of hair about her forehead, the drooping pout of the upper lip, sharpened his interest and caused him to meditate.