She looked at him with a glance of superb scorn.
"Not as fast or as far as I have ridden," she said. "But if you were not in the same field as the fox during the race, I suppose you think you are at least in at the death. Perhaps you are. You might, perchance, claim my dead body—it is certain you shall never have lot or parcel of my living soul."
"Oh, how brave we are! It reminds me of the grand old times when we were both heroes. You think you hate me, do you? Perhaps you do. I know I have done you deadly wrong; but that wrong I am most anxious to right. Your judgment is clear beyond that of average mortals, and I but ask you to exercise it in this case. I am sure that you will, if you treat me fairly, acknowledge that, in all that past, on which you now profess to scorn to look, I acted in a manly, noble way, and as best I could for your best interests. Won't you give me that credit?"
"You! you! Give credit to you! Why, you abominable, loathsome spawn of the slum and the prison—it was not the way that I was injured, but the thing that injured me! When I think of that, I quiver and glow white from crown to toe. Is it a wonder that I went wild when I realized it? Leave me, leave me before I die of rage!"
She flamed up like a mad tigress. Her eyes flashed on him with a baleful light, and her white, regular teeth shut with an angry click. Only a weapon at hand and she would have shot him dead; only strength, and she would have torn him limb from limb.
And he? He stood and looked her in the eyes without flinching. Only his face was deathly white for a moment, and then there rose a something in his throat that seemed to be choking him as he smothered his anger.
"You want it to be without the gloves, do you? So be it. Here! See here! These hands of mine are tender enough for a backwoodsman, are they not? Yet see where they are half-eaten off at the wrists. Ha! ha! you don't see it—why, they are dropping off from the burning touch of the cursed gyves. Right round there is where they clung. No mark there? Well, there ought to be, for I've worn the fetters. Yes, there's the hand of a jail-bird with the prison smutch on it; and he offers it to you. You don't accept, do you?"
She shrunk away from him with a gesture of horror, yet her eyes were fixed upon his face as though by fascination, while he continued:
"Did you never hear of a martyr to justice? Do you know nothing of the cry, 'Hang some one to quiet the public nerves?' Do you know how a name can be murdered, and that, for such a murder, there can be no retributive justice? I loved you once, and I love you now; you loved me once, and you shall love me again. The ex-convict is at your feet; but he woos you in the teeth of danger; he does not forget that. There is little time to be lost in idle play. We have had all the romance years ago; we come now to the stern reality."
She burst out: "I did not love you then, I will not love you now. I have passed beyond the regions of romance, and learned what I would that I had known then. You can not drive me and you dare not kill me."