For once Dave Law’s passion failed to ignite at the heat of another’s anger; he only sat limp and helpless in the judge’s grasp.  Finally he muttered:  “I played square enough.  It’s one of those things that just happen.  We couldn’t help ourselves.  She’ll come to you for her divorce.”

The lawyer uttered a shocking oath.  “Then it’s no mere romantic infatuation on her part?”

“Oh no!”

Ellsworth loosed his grip.  He turned away and began to pace the office floor, shaking his head.  “This is—­unfortunate.  Alaire, of all people—­as if she didn’t have enough to bear.”  He turned fiercely upon the cowering figure in the chair, saying:  “I’ll tell her the whole truth myself, before she goes any further.”

“No!  Oh, please!  Let me, in my own way.”  Dave writhed and sank his face in his hands once more.  After a while he said, “I’m waiting for you to tell me it’s all a nightmare.”

“Humph!” The judge continued his restless pacing.  “I was sorry for you when you came in here, and it took all my strength to tell you; but now you don’t matter at all.  I was prepared to have you go ahead against my advice, but—­I’ll see you damned first.”

“You have damned me.”

When Ellsworth saw the haggard face turned to his he ceased his walk abruptly.  “I’m all broken up, Dave,” he confessed in a gentler tone than he had used heretofore.  “But you’ll thank me some day.”

Law was no longer the big, strong, confident fellow who had entered the office such a short time before.  He had collapsed; he seemed to have shrunk; he was pitifully appealing.  Although there were many things he would have said, many questions upon his tongue, he could not voice them now, and it was with extreme difficulty that he managed to follow the judge’s words at all.

After a time he rose and shook Ellsworth’s hand limply, mechanically; then he shambled out of the office.  Like a sick man, he stumbled down the stairs and into the street.  When he entered his hotel the clerk and some of the idlers in the lobby looked at him queerly, but he did not see them.

All that night Dave walked the floor of his room or sat hunched up on the edge of his bed, staring at the wall and fighting the fears that preyed upon him.

He had faith enough in Alaire to believe that she would marry him regardless of the facts; her kiss, that one delirious moment when he had held her to his breast, had taught him much, and it was, in fact, this very certainty which made his struggle so hard.  After all, why not? he asked himself a thousand times.  Ellsworth’s fears were surely exaggerated.  Who could say that Frank Law had passed on his heritage?  There was at least a chance that he had not, and it would require more than a remote possibility, more evidence than Ellsworth could summon, to dismay Alaire.  Suppose it should transpire that he was somehow defective?  What then?  The signs of his mental failing would