So he sat down in his chair and finished his drink, and told me to blaze across at him from where I sat in the other chair.

I tried to get out of it, partly because I seemed to have seen more good in Minchin in those last ten minutes than in all the months that I had known him; he might be a brute, but he was a British brute, and all right about fair play.
Besides, for the moment, it was difficult to believe he was serious, or even very angry.

But I, on my side, was more in a dream than not, or he would not have managed me as he did.

He broke out again, cursed me and his wife, and swore that he would shoot her too if I didn't go through with it.

You can't think of the things he was saying when--but I believe he said them on purpose to make me.