She would have threatened me and called me names. That sort,
when they know you are helpless, there's nothing to stop them. I don't
know how it is, but bad people, real bad people that you can see are
bad, they get over me somehow. It's the way they set about downing one.
I am afraid of wickedness."
Heyst watched the changing expressions of her face. He encouraged her,
profoundly sympathetic, a little amused.
"I quite understand. You needn't apologize for your great delicacy in
the perception of inhuman evil. I am a little like you."
"I am not very plucky," she said.
"Well! I don't know myself what I would do, what countenance I would
have before a creature which would strike me as being evil incarnate.
Don't you be ashamed!"
She sighed, looked up with her pale, candid gaze and a timid expression
on her face, and murmured:
"You don't seem to want to know what he was saying."
"About poor Morrison? It couldn't have been anything bad, for the poor
fellow was innocence itself. And then, you know, he is dead, and nothing
can possibly matter to him now."
"But I tell you that it was of you he was talking!" she cried.
"He was saying that Morrison's partner first got all there was to get
out of him, and then, and then--well, as good as murdered him--sent him
out to die somewhere!"
"You believe that of me?" said Heyst, after a moment of perfect silence.
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