“You loved Dandy Chater—oh—don’t interrupt me; you would say you love him still, I suppose?—I knew that, from your own lips, as well as from what I saw and heard when you were together. I wonder if you would love him now—if you could see him?”
“I don’t understand you,” she said, in a low voice. “Why should I not?”
“Because—well because he wouldn’t look nice,” he responded, with a grim laugh. “In a word—because he’s dead.”
Through the mind of the girl there floated the words the little man who had accompanied Harry had spoken—“One is dead—the other living!” But she said nothing; she was almost afraid to speak, because she wanted so desperately to hear what he had to say in explanation of that mystery.
“Yes—he’s dead. He stood in my way—blocked up the path which led to my desires. More than that, I had made a tool of him for years—had used him for every mean and petty thing I did not care to soil my own hands with. He might have told tales. Do you know what I did with him?”
She looked at him with a face of horror, and slowly shook her head.
“Look round these walls—look at this miserable place in which you stand. It should have a value in your eyes; for it has heard his death scream. Within a dozen yards of it, on the bank of this river—at night—I struck him down. And I’d strike him down again to-night, if he stood alive before me. And you—you thought to defy a man who felt the killing of that puny lover of yours no more than he would have felt the killing of a rat!”
He had felt it, though—and he felt it still; or why did his hands tremble in their grip of the table, and why did he glance for a moment, with that blanched face, behind him?
She, too, began to fear him now, as she had not feared him before; looked about her wildly, as if for a way of escape.
“Ah—you shake and tremble now—do you?” he said, mockingly. “You’ll tremble more when you know what I intend to do. Think of it. You’re here, far away from any houses, and you may scream your heart out, and no one will hear you. Whatever love I felt for you has gone—turned into a viler thing. By God—pretty Miss Innocence”—he brought his fist down heavily on the table—“you shall dally with me an hour or two—for the first and last time; and then go join your lover in the river!”