"How do you know it?"
"Don't you suppose I can tell?" In spite of himself Dave's voice rose again, but it was plain from the lawyer's expression that to a man of his training no mere conviction unsupported by proof had weight. This skepticism merely kept Dave's impatience at a white heat. "Very well, then," he argued, angrily, "let's say that I'm wrong and you're right. Let's agree that I am his son. What of it? What makes you think I've inherited—the damned thing? It isn't a disease. Me, insane? Rot!" He laughed harshly, took another uncertain turn around the room, then sank into his chair and buried his face in his hands.
Ellsworth was more keenly distressed than his hearer imagined; when next he spoke his voice was unusually gentle. "It IS a disease, Dave, or worse, and there's no way of proving that you haven't inherited it. If there is the remotest possibility that you have—if you have the least cause to suspect—why, you couldn't marry and—bring children into the world, now could you? Ask yourself if you've shown any signs—?"
"Oh, I know what you mean. You've always said I go crazy when I'm—angry. Well, that's true. But it's nothing more than a villainous temper. I'm all right again afterward."
"I wasn't thinking so much of that. But are you sure it's altogether temper?" the judge insisted. "You don't merely lose control of yourself; you've told me more than once that you go completely out of your mind; that you see red and want to kill and—"
"Don't you?"
"I never felt the slightest desire to destroy, no matter how angry I chanced to be. I've always asserted that murderers, homicides, suicides, were irresponsible; that they were sick here." Ellsworth touched his forehead. "I can't see how any sane man can take his own or another's life, no matter what the provocation. But I'm not a doctor, and that's an extreme view, I know. Anyhow, you'll agree that if you have Frank Law's blood in your veins it won't do to marry."
"I haven't got it," the younger man groaned, his gaze turned sullenly downward. "Even granting that I have, that's no sign I'd ever—run amuck the way he did."
"You told me just now that you don't know your family history?"
"Yes. What little I've heard isn't very pretty nor very much to the family's credit. They were a bad lot, I believe."