“Why should she say that?”
Dinky-Dunk stared at me with something strangely like a pleading look in his haggard eye.
“Wouldn’t it be better to keep away from all that, at a time like this?” he finally asked.
“No,” I told him, “this is the time we can’t keep away from it. She wrote you that because she was in love with you. Isn’t that the truth?”
Dinky-Dunk raised his hand, as though he were attempting a movement of protest, and then dropped it again. His eyes, I noticed, were luminous with a sort 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.