“But what will you do? You have never had any experience in managing so large a property.”
“I can learn, sir.”
“I know; but that would be so tedious, and you are liable to make many mistakes. You need some one older and wiser than yourself to advise you.”
Mr. Dalton hesitates a moment and leans nearer Earle, eagerly searching his handsome face. But Earle sits pale and quiet, knowing, nevertheless, what is to follow, and conscious also of what the result will be.
“If—if,” began Mr. Dalton, with some hesitation, “you could be—ahem!—persuaded to—to overlook the past—if we could make a treaty to bury the hatchet, and be at peace. I—I really regret, you know, all that has gone by—and if we could come to some sort of terms, I—would consent to return to Wycliffe with you, and give you the benefit of my superior judgment and advice.”
Such amazing disinterestedness, such unblushing assurance was absolutely startling.
A quick, hot flush mounted to Earle’s brow, and for a moment his lips trembled as if scathing and terrible words rushed unbidden there for utterance.
Then he lifted his dark eyes and fixed them in a quiet, steady gaze upon the man opposite him.
Sumner Dalton could not meet that gaze unmoved. In spite of his hardihood, a blush of confusion mantled his face, and his guilty look told that all sense of shame was not yet quite dead within him.
“When I was simply Earle Wayne,” he began, without removing his glance, “a poor boy working for his daily bread, I was considered unworthy of your notice. When misfortune overtook me and I became a criminal in the sight of the law, even after you knew that it was your son who had been sentenced to hard labor for three years, you made no effort to help me—you did not come near me to offer me one kind and sympathizing word even. When your daughter was kind to me, and I dared to feel a tender regard for her, you resolved to crush me. When a kind friend remembered me on his death-bed, you would have wrested from me the comparatively small sum that he had bequeathed to me out of his abundance. You have scorned, insulted, and wronged me in every possible way. You have even owned to an implacable enmity toward me. For all this I could forgive you, if convinced that you were truly repentant, since it was against me alone that all your malice and hatred were turned; but for the slight, the scorn, and the misery which you plotted, and, to all intents and purposes, executed against my gentle and innocent mother, I cannot. I have no right to forgive you. By your own wickedness and folly you have forfeited all right to be acknowledged as either her husband or my father. Mr. Dalton, you can never cross the threshold of Wycliffe.”