stand? That's what happened, and it's all
you know. Said he would kill you, apparently commenced then, and you
acted in self-protection. Now, repeat that."

She gazed at him in a trembling confusion. "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.
If now he had a different, perhaps deeper, sense of responsibility, he
had known nothing of it in the first months of his contact with her....
A different man, he reiterated; and one as faithfully representative as
he was to-day. But totally another; men changed, evolved, progressed.
Jasper Penny was convinced that it was a progression; but in a broad
manner beyond all hope of his comprehension, and entirely outside
dogmatic good and evil. The germ of it must have been in him from the
first; his burning necessity for Susan, he told himself, had been born
in him, laid dormant until, yes--it had been stirred into activity by
Essie Scofield, by the revulsion which had followed that natural
development.

He was suddenly conscious that Al Schimpf had ceased domineering Essie.
The lawyer swung about, facing them with an expression of commonplace
satisfaction. "It's all in fine order," he declared. "I want, if
possible, to stud