“Must you—must you really pay Elisha Cook all those thousands and thousands of dollars? Have you got to do it?”
He straightened.
“I’ll pay the last dollar,” he declared, sharply. “And it won’t be paid in notes dated fifty years after death or anything like that. It will be paid cash down, and just as soon as that cash can be raised. You can tell that to any prying busybody that asks you.”
She sighed again. “I can hardly believe you have lost that suit,” she said. “I—why, everybody took it for granted you would win. I don’t see how those Supreme Court folks could do such a thing.”
His lip curled. “I was a little surprised myself,” he admitted. “So were Cook and his gang, I rather guess.... And yet, maybe I ought to have expected it. Things have been going that way with me lately.... Well, is there anything else you want to say—or find out?”
She hesitated. “Why, yes, there is,” she said. “I hardly know how to say it, either. Foster, you’ll have to get rid of—to sell some of your property to pay this awful lot of money, won’t you? That is what they are sayin’ around town. Please don’t mind my askin’. It’s more my business than it sounds. I’ll tell you why in a minute.”
He crossed his knees. “I shall sell about everything before I get through, I suppose,” he replied.
“Not this house? You won’t have to give up this lovely house?”
“No. At least I don’t think so. I shall hang on to it till the last gun fires, anyhow.”
“Foster, you own the house I live in. If—this was what I really came to tell you—if you feel you ought to sell that house along with other things I don’t want you to let any thought of me stand in the way. Perhaps you wouldn’t anyway. I know you will never forgive me for—well, for that business of Esther’s marriage. I have thought about it seems to me every minute since it happened, and tried to look at it every way, and I can’t feel that I did wrong. In fact I am surer than ever that I did right. But you don’t feel so, I know. Well, that’s past and gone. Now about this house Millard and I live in, that I rent from you. If you have a good chance to sell for a good price, and you feel you ought to sell, then you must do it. I can find somewhere else to go just as well as not. Don’t you fret about that at all. Promise me you won’t.”