"Think," he replied, "that she will pass from ten to twenty years in jail."
The girl's face trembled as if he had struck it, but—"Well," she said, "you the upholder of the law—you shall judge. She lived off me—that's nothing!—But she lived off and bled others, and drove and hounded them, and made me an ignorant partner in it—that's something, you'll admit! And—Nancy! How about that? She lied to Will about Nancy and Jim Ingham.—Come, isn't the balance getting heavy? She just as much killed Jim as if she had done it with her hand; and if Will—dies," cried Christina, with a breath like a little scream upon the word, "it is my sister kills him! I am stone and ice to her! When I saw Nancy's message, in that moment I knew who and what my sister was, and then and there I had done with her! Let me hear you blame me! And yet," said Christina with a change of voice, "there is one more count!"
Her look had changed and darkened. "When that crew of hers laid hands on him—O!" she cried out, suddenly. And flinging forth her arms buried her face in them.
The effect on Ten Euyck was electrical. Hitherto drugged and fascinated by the mobility of her beauty, the lights and emotions varying in it, he now shot forward on his sofa as if, in a mechanical toy, a spring had been touched.
"It isn't possible!" he cried. "That calf! That milk-sop! Christina, you don't mean—Herrick!"
She let her arms fall, and without raising her head, lifted her eyes for him to read.
He broke into a loud laugh that jangled, hysterically cold, round the great, brilliant room. "And to think," he said, "that all this time I have thought of him as my pet diversion, my wittol, my moon-calf! It has been my one jest through all this wretched business to see the importance of that great baby! To watch him industriously acquiring bumps and bruises, and getting more and more scratches on his innocent nose! I waited to see it put out of joint forever when you threw him flat upon it! I thought that we were laughing in our sleeves at him, together! When I had this appointment with you safe, I smiled to see him careering up and down the country like Lochinvar in a child's reader.—
"'He stayed not for brake and he stopped not for stone,
He swam the Eske River—'"
Ten Euyck sprang up and catching Christina by the elbows snatched her smartly to her feet and shook her till, on her slim neck, her head bobbed back and forth. "What did you tell me for," he cried, "if you hoped to be rid of me! I, at least, am no baby, and I have had enough of this! Your dear Lochinvar is doubtless swimming and riding somewhere in the neighborhood. But not within call! And let me assure you, though he stay not for brake and he stop not for stone—yet ere he alights here at Netherby Gate—"
"Go on!" said Christina, "you know the end of the verse." She flung it, with a gallant backward movement of her head, straight in his teeth—