"That's where you slip up, Nell," said Hamlin imperturbably. "It WAS an
accident and a bad one. My horse lamed himself coming down the grade. I
sighted the nearest shanty, where I thought I might get another horse.
It happened to be this." For the first time he changed his attitude, and
leaned back contemplatively in his chair.
She came towards him quickly. "You didn't use to lie, Jack," she said
hesitatingly.
"Couldn't afford it in my business,--and can't now," said Jack
cheerfully. "But," he added curiously, as if recognizing something in
his companion's agitation, and lifting his brown lashes to her, the
window, and the ceiling, "what's all this about? What's your little game
here?"
"I'm married," she said, with nervous intensity,--"married, and this is
my husband's house!"
"Not married straight out!--regularly fixed?"
"Yes," she said hurriedly.
"One of the boys? Don't remember any Rylands. SPELTER used to be very
sweet on you,--but Spelter mightn't have been his real name?"
"None of our lot! No one you ever knew; a--a straight out, square man,"
she said quickly.
"I say, Nell, look here! You ought to have shown up your cards without
even a call. You ought to have told him that you danced at the Casino."
"I did."
"Before he asked you to marry him?"
"Before."
Jack got up from his chair, put his hands in his pockets, and looked
at her curiously. This Nell Montgomery, this music-hall "dance and song
girl," this girl of whom so much had been SAID and so little PROVED!
Well, this was becoming interesting.
"You don't understand," she said, with nervous feverishness; "you
remember after that row I had with Jim, that night the manager gave us a
supper,--when he treated me like a dog?"
"He did that," interrupted Jack.
"I felt fit for anything," she said, with a half-hysterical laugh, that
seemed voiced, however, to check some slumbering memory. "I'd have cut
my throat or his, it didn't matter which"--
"It mattered something to us, Nell," put in Jack again, with polite
parenthesis; "don't leave US out in the cold."
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