Page:Melville Davisson Post--The Man of Last Resort.djvu/133

Rh That is all over and past and gone. Can't I permit it to sleep and be forgotten? Suppose there was another man? Suppose there is now? Must I empty out his heart too? Can't I spare him? Can't I leave him out of this?”

“I am waiting, madam,” said Mason, quietly.

The young woman passed her hand downward over her face, as though to remove something that was clinging to her.

“If you must know,” she said slowly, “his name is Dalton, Robert Dalton, a member of the law firm of Carpenter, Lomax, & Dalton, of our city. He is said to be an able lawyer. He is the elder Mrs. Van Bartan's legal adviser, but I have no right to tell you all this. It is unjust to him. and unjust to me, and unfair to us all.”

“And he still loves you?” said Mason, with the blunt indifference of a surgeon who thrusts his thumb into a wound.

The young woman threw back her head. “You are brutal,” she cried, “to ask such a question, and I should be a fool, a miserable, contemptible fool if I should answer.”