The official shook his head. "As I understand it, he didn't have anybody but a brother, and he died last spring, the papers said."
"No friends either?"
"Friends? Well, he wouldn't be likely to have any, would he—a feller that's been crazy?"
"It's cursed luck!" Dayton had told him. He was still young enough to feel resentful of life's contemptuous injustices. "And he's only twenty-five; got his whole life before him. He's got to have his chance. He's got to have a fighting chance."
As he looked at his client now, he was careful to keep anything like compassion out of his eyes. He removed a cracked pitcher full of purple asters from its perilous position at the head of the bed and swept his glance over the crude table littered with envelopes in cream and pastel shades. "Correspondence still growing?" he inquired genially.
Kenwick stacked the vari-colored missives into a pile. Most of them had been accompanied by flowers, and all were signed by society women of Mont-Mer. A few bore the more guarded signature of "A Friend," or "A Sympathizer," with initials underneath. They condoled, they admonished, they even made cautious love.
"Can you fathom it, Dayton?" the prisoner asked, weighing the correspondence in one hand as though the answer to the riddle lay in avoir-dupois. "These women think I'm guilty of murder. They all seem to think I'm guilty as hell; and yet they send me flowers, and love-letters." He turned his back contemptuously upon the purple asters. "It comes over me every once in a while, Dayton, that I'm not the only person in this world who has had moments of mental aberration."
The other man reached over, took up the stack of envelopes, and examined them with curious interest. Here and there he recognized a coat of arms or a monogram. "Going to answer any of them?" he queried.
"Answer them!"
"Well, most of them seem to expect a reply. You see, you really can't blame them very much, either. These women are fed up on life. They come out here every winter seeking a new sensation."