“The fellow had been around the house day after day.  You had encouraged him at first; but then you got frightened; he beat you—­hear that?—­struck you with his fist, and threatened worse if you didn’t go through old Penny’s pocket for him.  He even hinted at something you might do together, and then get away with a mint.  Culser was at it when Mr. Penny called, and took it up when he left, at about six o’clock.  He said he wanted money bad, debts were hounding him; and he was going to get it out of Penny, out of you.  There’s where you said you would warn Jasper Penny; and remember how he struck you, in the back, because you turned, and it hurts yet—­there up by the left shoulder, the left shoulder, the left!  Then, he had been drinking in your house and at a tavern, he threatened to kill you if you didn’t do what he wanted.  You honestly thought he’d do it, and snatched a pistol out of a table drawer, and....  Do you understand?  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.