“Thank you, no. I have a very excellent memory, and can recollect all I require. Besides, I’ve taken a few notes,” was the bold and defiant answer, “All I would request of you, my dear girl, is to keep a still tongue in your head, go up to bed, and forget all about this unexpected meeting. Such a course will be much the best for you, I assure you.”
“You—my enemy, are trying to advise me as a friend—eh? This is really amusing! I tell you quite frankly that I intend to give you over to the police. You cleverly entrapped me, and now from me you may expect no clemency.”
“I want none,” he laughed. “But if I’m arrested, your friend, ‘Red Mullet,’ shall also see the inside of a prison again. I promise you that.”
“He is innocent of this burglary,” she said.
“But he isn’t innocent of certain other little matters about which Scotland Yard will be only too delighted to know,” replied the fellow, with an evil grin. “So if you don’t want him to go to ‘quod’—and he’s been pretty good to you, I think—you’d better remain silent about to-night. And there’s the other matter—the—”
And he paused, and looked straight into her face, without concluding.
“Well?” she asked in a hard voice, holding the train of her robe with one hand, and still facing him boldly. “And what is the other matter, pray?”
“I wish to tell you quite plainly that if you choose to be a little fool, you’ll take the consequences. They’ll fall on you, and pretty heavily too. Trust me to escape them.”
“And I tell you that I intend to be a little fool, as you so politely put it,” was her fearless response. “It is my duly to my father to go at once and tell him of my discovery. And I will!”
“Very well,” he answered quite calmly, his evil eyes still fixed upon hers. “Go. You are perfectly at liberty. To me, it is of no great consequence, but to you it will mean both the ruin of your reputation and the loss of your lover!”