Sarah did not like what she saw in his eyes—a shadow, a gleam, roving together behind the steady pupils, implacable as death. Nevertheless, she managed to laugh again.
“You can’t scare me, Jimmie. Not now you can’t, and you know it!”
“I can scare you,” he answered. He took hold of her arm, halfway between her wrist and her elbow. She tried to twist away. His fingers came down like machinery. She gasped and bit her lip. He relaxed his grip and went on. “I am going to scare you now, Sarah, and you will stay scared—because you are going to know what I mean—and you are going to know that I am not bluffing. I have learned, by watching others learn, that nothing matters in this life except integrity. In this case, we can call it honor. That is the one precious thing. My work—what I am trying to do—is very important to the honor of the world. It is not any more important, however, than my own integrity to myself. That, in fact, comes first, because everything else in the world is founded on it.”
“Let go! You said you weren’t going to lecture me! You’re hurting!”
“I’ve seen a great many people die, Sarah. People of all ages. They died haphazardly—but all of them in the line of maintaining honor. In the same cause I am no longer afraid to take the same punishment—and I am not afraid to dish it out. Do you understand that?”
The girl blanched. “Jimmie! That’s insane! Let—go!”
“Have you forgotten you read those diaries, Sarah?”
She writhed and tugged. “Let go! You’ll make marks on me! Just because you can torture me this minute, doesn’t help you. When you let go, I’ll do it sooner—and worse!”
He forced her to her feet and pushed her back on the bed. She tried, suddenly, to rake his face. He slapped her with his free hand. Sarah shuddered but she did not cry. He held her on the edge of the bed; his fingers grew tighter and tighter, slowly, while he talked. “You have just made a perfect, small-scale example of the hideous thing that has come alive all over the world, Sarah. The corrupt use of force. And I can see what must be done to crush it. I can see now why decent people so passionately detested to take the step. And you will have to see that I have learned how to take it. I am ashamed of us all, that this is necessary.” He paused. His voice was solemn. “Sarah, if you breathe a word of this business, I will kill you.”
She began losing her nerve. She forgot the pain in her arm. She met his eye with unstable hostility. “You’d be hung for it!”