The despair in her voice moved him strongly but hardly more than her calmness. There was no flash in her spirit; but there was strength and a certain stern attractiveness, as there is in the bog; and his heart ached with a sore longing. “He isn’t unkind to you, is he?” he forced himself to ask, and she laughed contemptuously. “Unkind? What is it to be unkind?” She looked down contemplatively, as if the question interested her. “Is he unkind?” she repeated in a low voice. “I never thought of that. He doesn’t beat me, if that’s what you mean, except now and again with his tongue and his looks; and two can play at that game.” “Beat you!” The man’s lips tightened and he spoke through his teeth; “t’ first time ’at I hear ’at he’s laid hands on you I’ll do him in! Beat you! Devil as he is he isn’t black-hearted enough for that!” “I don’t know that he is a devil,” she replied listlessly; “but he knows how to raise one, and he’s so cold and sure of himself that he makes me scream inside, though he’s never heard me and never will. I’m afraid of him; but he doesn’t know it, and I’m not whining; I’m just telling you how I feel. I’m like a baby in his hands. He’s a man who gets what he wants _always_. He wanted my money so he took me, same as you must take t’ purse with what’s inside it. And he perhaps wanted a woman, too, and one’s as good as another to such as him.” “And now he shoves you on one side; makes dirt of you,” said Jagger bitterly. “Can’t I see it in his face? And he’ll take a pride in doing it, and more by half if he thinks it ’ud hurt me, and that you’d care. But that’s more’n I ought to have said.” “More than I ought to let you say,” she replied, “but for this once you shall say what you like and that must end it. It was here we fell out, and it’s here I’ll tell you that I know it was my fault. I meant to make it up with you; I’d thought about nothing else for hours on end; but there’s something—I don’t know what it is, if it isn’t fate—that pulls one way when we pull another, and pulls harder than us. And then I was mad with you because you took me at my word; and _he_ came along and I married him whilst I was sore—married him at a Registry; no service or anything.” He had never taken his eyes from her face; never sought to interrupt her during this recital. One foot he had raised and placed on the rock where she was sitting; and pity softened the deep lines on his forehead as the evening light mellows the harsh brows of Gordel.