t of inward-burning misery. But I had no intention of being
merciful. I had no chance of being merciful. It was like an operation
without ether, but it had to be gone through with. It had to be cut
out, in some way, that whole cancerous growth of hate and distrust.

"Isn't that the truth?" I repeated.

"Oh, Tabby, don't turn the knife in the wound!" cried Dinky-Dunk, with
his face more than ever pinched with misery.

"Then it _is_ a wound!" I proclaimed in dolorous enough triumph. "But
there's still another question, Dinky-Dunk, you must answer," I went
on, speaking as slowly and precisely as I could, as though deliberation
in speech might in some way make clearer a matter recognized as only
too dark in spirit. "And it must be answered honestly, without any
quibble as to the meaning of words. Were you in love with Lady Allie?"

His gesture of repugnance, of seeming self-hate, was both a prompt and
a puzzling one.

"That's the hideous, the simply hideous part of it all," he cried out
in a sort of listless desperation.

"Why hideous?" I demanded, quite clear-headed, and quite determined
that now or never the overscored slate of suspicion should be wiped
clean. I still forlornly and foolishly felt, I suppose, that he might
yet usher before me some miraculously simple explanation that would
wipe his scutcheon clean, that would put everything back to the older
and happier order. But as I heard his deep-wrung cry of "Oh, what's
the good of all this?" I knew that life wasn't so romantic as we're
always trying to make it.

"I've got to know," I said, as steel-cold as a surgeon.

"But can't you see that it's--that it's worse than revolting to me?"
he contended, with the look of a man harried beyond endurance.

"Why should it be?" I exacted.

He sank down in the low chair with the ranch-brand on its leather
back. It was an oddly child-like movement of collapse. But I daren't
let myself feel sorry for him.

"Because it's all so rottenly ignoble," he said, without looking at
me.

"For whom?" I asked, trying to speak calmly.

"For me--for you," he cried out, with his head in his hands. "For you
to have been faced with, I mean. It's awful, to think that you've had
to stand it!" He reached out for me, but I was too far away for him to
touch. "Oh, Tabby, I've been such an awful rotter. And this thing
that's happened has just brought it home to me."

"Then you cared, that much?" I demanded, feeling the bottom of my
hea