“What do I want?” he said at length in a deep, rich voice, shot here and there with strange nasal tones, and here and there with the remains of a brogue.  “Well, I want that you should stop persecuting those poor kids.”

“I persecuting them?  Don’t be absurd, Marty,” answered Mrs. Wayne.

“Persecuting them; what else?” retorted Marty, fiercely.  “What else is it?  They wanting to get married, and you determined to send the boy up the river.”

“I don’t think we’ll go over that again.  I have a lady here on business.”

“Oh, please don’t mind me,” said Mrs. Farron, settling back, and wriggling her hands contentedly into her muff.  She rather expected the frivolous courage of her tone to draw the ire of Burke’s glance upon her, but it did not.

“Cruel is what I call it,” he went on.  “She wants it, and he wants it, and her family wants it, and only you and the judge that you put up to opposing—­”

“Her family do not want it.  Her brother—­”

“Her brother agrees with me.  I was talking to him yesterday.”

“Oh, that’s why he has a black eye, is it?” said Mrs. Wayne.

“Black eyes or blue,” said Marty, with a horizontal gesture of his hands, “her brother wants to see her married.”

“Well, I don’t,” replied Mrs. Wayne, “at least not to this boy.  I will never give my consent to putting a child of her age in the power of a degenerate little drunkard like that.”

Mrs. Farron listened with all her ears.  She did not think herself a prude, and only a moment before she had been accusing Mrs. Wayne of ignorance of the world; but never in all her life had she heard such words as were now freely exchanged between Burke and his hostess on the subject of the degree of consent that the girl in question had given to the advances of Burke’s protege.  She would have been as embarrassed as a girl if either of the disputants had been in the least aware of her presence.  Once, she thought, Mrs. Wayne, for the sake of good manners, was on the point of turning to her and explaining the whole situation; but fortunately the exigencies of the dispute swept her on too fast.  Adelaide was shocked, physically rather than morally, by the nakedness of their talk; but she did not want them to stop.  She was fascinated by the spectacle of Marty Burke in action.  She recognized at once that he was a dangerous man, not dangerous to female virtue, like all the other men to whom she had heard the term applied, but actually dangerous to life and property.  She was not in the least afraid of him, but she knew he was a real danger.  She enjoyed the knowledge.  In most ways she was a woman timid in the face of physical danger, but she had never imagined being afraid of another human being.  That much, perhaps, her sheltered training had done for her.  “If she goes on irritating him like this he may murder us both,” she thought.  What she really meant was that he might murder Mrs. Wayne, but that, when he came to her and began to twist her neck, she would just say, “My dear man, don’t be silly!” and he would stop.