"He had a legal right," he said, cruelly. "On that I stand." Then looking at her fixedly and speaking with slow emphasis as if weighing every word and giving her time to do the same: "Had he been permitted to live out his life he might, himself, have changed the provisions of that will—have rescinded that which you feel to be cruel and unnatural—that which I do not say was not cruel and unnatural. But—" his eyes sought the brown spot on the floor, and hers followed them,—"before he could do this his life was cut off—"
"By his own hand," she protested.
"—and the possibility of undoing what he had done was wrested from him. Well! Let it stand."
She looked at him as if she were trying to fathom his meaning. But his face was inscrutable. Then she rose.
"I have made my last appeal to you," she said. "It is useless to humiliate myself further. I came here hoping against hope that having vindicated before the world your legal right to the guardianship and custody of my child, you might then be so just, so generous, as to give him back into the keeping of his natural guardian. But I have overrated you."
He surprised her by a reply to this.
"Did it ever occur to you," he asked quietly, "that you might have underrated me?"
"No. Never."
"Suppose for one moment—for purposes of argument only—that I am not the black-hearted thing you think me—that I would not drag shrieking children from their mother's breasts for the mere pleasure of the thing—can you then conceive no reason why I should feel that I and not you—you—" he was looking searchingly at her now, his eyes narrowing and concentrating their gleam upon her face—"should have the keeping of my dead brother's child?"
She shook her head slowly, wonderingly.