“Dolores, you are my Paradise—lost and regained, though not yet redeemed. I have come to redeem you.”
“Christ!” Malice sounded close behind the Satanic sneer. “Just what is your claim, redeemer?”
At last John Cabot answered him directly. “I want justice for this woman-soul. I want it now. I demand that you release her.”
“You want? You demand? And you contend that she belongs to the Fields, she compared with whom the ‘mother of harlots’ was a saint in a niche?”
“You lie!”
At the suppressed fury of John’s declaration, noxious fumes began to spread from the Belial glare.
“A strong word to use over a mere disparity in point of view. However, your compliment sounded genuine and I thank you. Sorry that your demand must be denied. Law of the land, you know.”
“The best thing about most laws is that they can be broken,” John asserted. “I cannot conceive of a great intellect that would not except this case, once it was explained. A woman who never had an unclean thought or an impulse that was not wholly kind has been sent into Badlands, while each of those who contributed to her fall has been reinstated in the opinion of men. A shop vulture has made a virtue of his vulturing. An alleged man of God——”
“Don’t go through the list,” His Majesty objected. “I’ve had many a laugh over the choice assortment. Doctor, lawyer, merchant, chief, richman, poorman, beggar-man——”
“Thief?” John interrupted in his turn. “I am the thief. And even I, the most culpable of all, have ‘come back’ in the opinion of my fellows—have been rewarded as was everybody concerned in her ruin.”