“Now I want to tell you something more, Miss Carle--if that’s your real name--” Gregory went on as she was putting her hands to her temples and exclaiming, and she winced again. “As I said before, you don’t look to me to be as bad as you seem, and for that reason I’m talking to you now. But just see how it is: Here I am, a young man just starting out in the world really, and here you are trying to ruin me. I was living here with my wife and my little two-year-old baby peacefully enough until she had to go to the mountains because our little boy was taken sick, and then you and Mrs. Skelton and Diamondberg and Castleman and the ‘brokers’ and all the rest of the crowd that are and have been around here watching and spying, came and began to cause me trouble. Now I’m not helpless. And you needn’t think I wasn’t warned before you came, because I was. There are just as many influential men on my side of the fence right now as there are on Tilney’s--will be--and he isn’t going to get away with this thing as easily as he thinks. But just think of your part in all this! Why should you want to ruin me or help these people? What have I ever done to you? I can understand Tilney’s wanting to do it. He thinks that I have facts which will injure him, and I have, and that because I haven’t made any public statement the evidence is still in my hands, and that if I am put out of the way or discredited the whole thing will blow over and nothing will happen to him--but it won’t. Not now any more. It can’t. This thing will go on just the same, whether I am here or not. But that isn’t the point either. I was told two months ago that you would come, not by Mrs. Skelton, but by friends of mine, and that an attempt would be made on my life,” and at that she opened her eyes wide and sat there apparently amazed, “and here you are on schedule time and doing just as you were told, and apparently you aren’t the least bit ashamed to do it. But don’t you think it’s a pretty shabby game for you to play?” He stared at her wearily and she at him, but now for the moment she said nothing, just sat there.