"
Exclamations broke from the crowd. It was the wild West. It was a country
where, not twenty years before, men did justice upon men without the
assistance of the law; and the West understood that the dark insult just
uttered would in days not far gone have meant death. The onlookers
exclaimed, and then became silent, because a subtle sense of tragedy
suddenly smothered their voices. Upon the silence there broke a little
giggling laugh. It came from lips that were one in paleness with a face
grown stony.
"I ought to kill you," Orlando said quietly after a moment, yet scarcely
above a whisper. "I ought to kill you, Mazarine, but that would only be
playing your game, for the law would get hold of me, and the girl that
has left you would be sorrowful, for she knows I love her, though I never
told her so. She'd be sorry to see the law get at me. She's going to be
mine some day, in the right way. I'm not going behind your back to say
it; I'm announcing it to all and sundry. I never did a thing to her that
couldn't have been seen by all the world, and I never said a thing to her
that couldn't be heard by all the world; but I hope she'll never go back
to you. You've made a sewer for her to live in, not a home. As I said, I
ought to kill you, but that would play your game, so I won't, not now.
But I tell you this, Mazarine: if I ever meet you again--and I'm sure to
do so--and you don't get off the road I'm travelling on, or the side-walk
I'm walking on, when I meet you or when I pass you, I'll let you have
what'll send you to hell, before you can wink twice.
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