“Prove what you have said! Is your real name Dalton?” yet even as he asked the question a cold sweat settled upon his forehead and about his mouth.
“Yes; I have always answered to the name of George Sumner Dalton, though for brevity’s sake I dropped the first name many years ago.”
“George Sumner Dalton!” repeated Earle, mechanically.
“Yes, you have it correct. Do you recognize any part of it?” was the mocking reply.
“I see, I see,” murmured the young man, pressing his hands upon his temples, and looking as if he was paralyzed with the suddenness of the intelligence.
Then all his mother’s sufferings—all the wrongs and disgraces of his own early life suddenly surged over him with overwhelming force, and he turned fiercely upon the man who dared to stand there and taunt him with those cruel facts.
“Then you are the man whom I have been looking for for seven long years,” he cried. “You are the wretch who plotted to betray my mother, and you dare stand there and own the dastardly act—you dare acknowledge the deed that makes you a man to be shunned and despised by all true, good men, brands you worse than a second Cain, and makes me loathe you until my very soul is sick, notwithstanding that the same blood may flow in our veins?”
“Earle! Earle! what are you saying?” cried Editha, wildly, and springing to his side, as the burning words fell with almost blighting force from his lips. “Spare him, Earle—I do not think he knows what he has been saying; this wild, wild story cannot be true; he must be mad!” And she clung to him, trembling in every limb, her teeth chattering with nervousness.
Earle himself shuddered as her words fell upon his ear, and his very heart seemed dying within him as he bent a look of keenest anguish upon her face.
Sumner Dalton his father and hers!