“ Mr. Headstone, what’s the matter?”
“Matter? Where?”
“ Mr. Headstone, have you heard the news? This news about the fellow, Mr. Eugene Wrayburn? That he is killed?”
“He is dead, then!” exclaimed Bradley.
Young Hexam standing looking at him, he moistened his lips with his tongue, looked about the room, glanced at his former pupil, and looked down. “I heard of the outrage,” said Bradley, trying to constrain his working mouth, “but I had not heard the end of it.”
“Where were you,” said the boy, advancing a step as he lowered his voice, “when it was done? Stop! I don’t ask that. Don’t tell me. If you force your confidence upon me, Mr. Headstone, I’ll give up every word of it. Mind! Take notice. I’ll give up it, and I’ll give up you. I will!”
The wretched creature seemed to suffer acutely under this renunciation. A desolate air of utter and complete loneliness fell upon him, like a visible shade.
“It’s for me to speak, not you,” said the boy. “If you do, you’ll do it at your peril. I am going to put your selfishness before you, Mr. Headstone—your passionate, violent, and ungovernable selfishness—to show you why I can, and why I will, have nothing more to do with you.”
He looked at young Hexam as if he were waiting for a scholar to go on with a lesson that he knew by heart and was deadly tired of. But he had said his last word to him.
“If you had any part—I don’t say what—in this attack,” pursued the boy; “or if you know anything about it—I don’t say how much—or if you know who did it—I go no closer—you did an injury to me that’s