“When will you come again, Daniel?” she asked with an oppressive humility.  She gazed at Jasper Penny with a momentary delay; then, with an utter disregard of his presence, laid her hands on the younger man’s shoulders.  “Soon,” she begged.  Obviously ill at ease he abruptly released himself.  “I don’t care,” she cried defiantly; “I’ll tell the whole world you are the sweetest man in it.  Jasper’s nothing to me nor I to him.  And I’m not afraid of him, of what he might threaten, either.  Stay, Daniel, and you’ll see.  I will look out for us, Dan.”

Her unexpected frankness was inevitably followed by an awkward silence.  Daniel Culser finally cursed below his breath, avoiding Jasper’s cold inquiring gaze.  “I’m glad I said it,” Essie proceeded; “now he knows how things are.”  She went up again to the younger, and laid a clinging arm about his shoulders.  “I’m mad about you, Daniel, you know it; there’s nothing I wouldn’t do for you, give you if I could.  Isn’t he beautiful?” she fatulously demanded of Jasper Penny.

“You are making a fool of yourself and me,” the subject of her adulation roughly declared.  He removed her arm so forcibly that the scarlet print of his fingers was visible on her soft, dead white skin.  “Probably you have gone and spoiled everything.  And remember what I said.  I am a man of my word.”

Jasper Penny dryly thought that the term man was singularly inappropriate in any connection with the meticulously garbed figure before him.  Essie would have a difficult time with that stony youth.  She regarded him with eyes of idolatry, drawing her fingers over the sleeve impatiently held aside from her touch.  “I’m going,” he stated once more, impolitely; but she barred him at the door.  “I want you to stay,” she cried excitedly; “hear what I am going to say, what I am going to do for you.”  She advanced toward Jasper Penny.  “I asked that Jannan for more money because I had given Daniel all I had, and I wanted still more, to give him.  I’ll demand things all my life for him; everything I have is his.”  She gasped, at the verge of an emotional outburst.  Her heart pounded unsteadily beneath an adventitious lace covering; her face was leaden with startling daubs of vermilion paint.  “Give me a great deal of money, now, at once ... so that I can go to Daniel with my hands full.”

“That is why I came here,” Jasper Penny replied; “to tell you that you must not use up your income at once, on the first week, almost, of its payment; because you will be able to get no more until another instalment is due.  I haven’t the slightest interest in where your money goes, it is absolutely your own; but I cannot have you after it every second day.  The administration will be put in a different quarter, rigidly dispensed; and any continued inopportunities will only result in difficulties for yourself.”