They passed into the "ladies' parlor," which was empty, except for a few articles of faded furniture, among which a new red settee in one corner glowed with a preternatural brilliance. Beatty sat on the red settee and drew the girl down beside him.
"Somebody got a kiss for her Freddie?" he said, his lips loosely apart and wrinkles springing into view at the sides of his nostrils.
"Oh, I—do' know," Daisy dropped her head a little; "let's just talk. It's nice to sit together an' talk, when we love each other so, isn't it?"
Beatty's answer to this was to thrust his arm about her waist, push his palm beneath her chin, and pull up her face toward his. The girl resisted at first; then, with a motion of yielding, laid her head back on his shoulder and raised her lips. Beatty kissed her, not reverently but roughly; then kissed her again; then again and again: burying his mouth into hers. A little hand came up and caressed his neck; then slipped down within his coat and rested as it were, upon his heart—moving softly, as though feeling for its beats.
Then hand and girl and all tore suddenly and strongly away—and Daisy Nixon was upon her feet, her cheeks glowing like fire, laughing as she held up the leather purse she had taken from his pocket.
"It was the only way!" she cried, breathlessly and sparklingly, as he sat agape; "the only way to get out of you what you owe to me, for the things I have let you think about me, Mr. Fred Beatty. You thought I didn't know all about you—what you did to poor Pearlie Brodie, making her the talk of Toddburn, with worse to come yet—a poor motherless girl, who was given up by a decent fellow that would have married her, if it hadn't been for you. You thought I didn't know. Yes: you thought I 'fell for you', as you'd call it. But I'll tell you what I did, an' you can put it in your pipe an' smoke it, and I hope it'll do you good. I needed you. I needed to get away from that place where I was wasting my life, and I had no money—so I used you. I've met ginks like you before. I could see through you from the first like a pane of glass—you poor, miserable imitation of a man!
"Now, I'm going to take this money and use it, to keep me till I get a job somewhere. Then I'm going to pay it back. But not to you—don't you ever think it. I'm going to send it to Pearlie Brodie. She'll need it badly enough, in a few months from now. She'd never have got it from you straight—never in this world—so she'll get it through me. Now, you get out of here! I've wasted too much breath talking to you. And keep this in your memory-box: I don't know you! So don't speak to me, if I ever have the bad luck to meet you again!"
The girl had barely finished speaking, when Beatty leaped at her, grabbing for the purse which she held. But she stepped quickly back—and, as he pressed in, gave him, with all the strength of her virile young body, a push that sent him sprawling.