"Oh! is that so?" she sneered. "Yes, I have. I feel awfully bad about what took place. I wanted to give you that money for your mother, and that night when I finally got rid of those meddlesome devils and—" "In the name of Heaven, stop!" Virginia cried. "I simply will not stand here and talk about that." "But I have the money still," he said, feebly. "You kept your word in coming for it, and I want to keep mine." "I wouldn’t touch a cent of it to save my life," she hurled at him. "If my mother lay before my eyes dying in agony and your money would save her, I wouldn’t have it. I wouldn’t take it to save my soul from perdition." "You are making it very hard for me," he said, desperately; and then, with a frankness she could not have looked for even from his coarsest side, he went on passionately: "I’m only a man, Virginia—a human being, full of love, admiration, and—passion. Young as you are, I can’t blame you, and, still you _did_ encourage me. You know you did. I’m nearly insane over it all. I want you, Virginia. These meetings with you, and the things you have let me say to you, if you have said nothing yourself, have lifted me to the very sky. I simply cannot bear up under your present actions, knowing that that old woman has been talking against me. I am willing to do anything on earth to set myself right. I admire you more than I ever dreamed I could admire a woman, and my love for you is like a torrent that nothing can dam. I must have you, Virginia. The whole thing has gone too far. You ought to have thought of this before you agreed to come to my house alone at night, when you knew I was—when you knew I had every reason to expect that you—" "Stop!" she cried, with white lips and eyes flashing. "You are a coward, as well as a scoundrel! You are daring to threaten me. You have made me hate myself. As for you, I despise you as I would a loathsome reptile. I hate you! I detest you! I wake up in the night screaming in terror, fancying that I’m again in that awful room, locked in like a slave, a prisoner subject to your will—waiting for you to bid good-night to your drunken friends—locked in by your hand to wait there in an agony of death. Love you? I hate you! I hate the very low-browed emptiness of your face. I hate my mother for the selfish fear of death which blinded me to my own rights as a woman. Oh, God, I want to die and be done with it!" She suddenly covered her impassioned face with her hands and shook convulsively from head to foot. "Oh, Virginia, don’t, don’t make a mountain out of a molehill," he began, with a leaning towards his old, seductive persuasiveness. "There is nothing to feel so badly about. You know that Ann Boyd got there before I—I—" "That’s all _you_ know about it," she said, uncovering eyes that flashed like lightning. "When I went there, with no interest in you further than a silly love of your honeyed words and _to get your money_, I did what I’ll never wipe from my memory."