You did your level best to get away from here, and the result is, that little Puritan is ready to worship you." "Yes--but this playing it on them--George--this--" "Who's playing it?
Not you; I see you've given away our names already." "I couldn't lie, and they know nothing by that." "Do you think they would be happier by knowing it?
Do you think that soft little creature would be as happy as she was to-night if she knew that her husband had been indirectly the means of laying me by the heels here?
Where is the swindle?
This hole in my leg?
If you had been five minutes under that girl's d--d sympathetic fingers you'd have thought it was genuine.

Is it in our trying to get away?
Do you call that ten-feet drift in the pass a swindle?
Is it in the chance of Hale getting back while we're here?
That's real enough, isn't it?
I say, Ned, did you ever give your unfettered intellect to the contemplation of THAT ?" Falkner did not reply.

There was an interval of silence, but he could see from the movement of George's shoulders that he was shaking with suppressed laughter.
"Fancy Mrs.Hale archly introducing her husband! My offering him a chair, but being all the time obliged to cover him with a derringer under the bedclothes.

Your rushing in from your peaceful pastoral pursuits in the barn, with a pitchfork in one hand and the girl in the other, and dear old mammy sympathizing all round and trying to make everything comfortable." "I should not be alive to see it, George," said Falkner gloomily.
"You'd manage to pitchfork me and those two women on Hale's horse and ride away; that's what you'd do, or I don't know you! Look here, Ned," he added more seriously, "the only swindling was our bringing that note here.

That was YOUR idea.