"But," she objected, "he was
only--he said. Oh! I was afraid I'd lose him." The lawyer moved closer
to her, his unwinking, grey-green eyes like slate. "He said he'd kill
you," he reiterated; "remember that, if you don't want to hang. He
struck you; where?" After a long pause she replied haltingly, "In the
back." Al Schimpf nodded, "Good. And he said you both were to get away
with a mint. He told you it would be easy; the old man would gladly buy
silence; and, by heaven, if he didn't--"
Jasper Penny stonily watched the intolerable degradation of the woman
bullied into the safety of a lie. This was worse than anything that had
gone before; he fell deeper and deeper into a strangling, humiliating
self-loathing. Stephen Jannan's handsome countenance was fixed and pale;
one hand lay on the table, empty and still. In the silence between
Schimpf's insistent periods Jasper Penny could hear Essie's sobbing
inspirations; he was unable to keep his gaze from her countenance,
jelly-like and robbed of every trace of human dignity. He wondered
vaguely at an absence of any sense of responsibility for what Essie
Scofield had become; he felt that an attitude of self-accusation, of
profound regret for the way they had taken together, should rest upon
him; but the thought, the effort, were perfunctory, obviously insincere.
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