now, I am sure he brings them from the good Lord."

"Do you remember," he said, suddenly, "a habit the boy had of sitting
on the sunny door-step, quite silent, by the hour?"

"I remember,"--turning her head away.

"It used to remind me of the days when I was a boy, on the shore of Lake
Erie. My father was a squatter there. There was nothing I did not dare
nor hope in those long dreams of what my life was to be. I would hunt,
wrestle, fight, as no man had done before. I would be the first leader
in the world,--a soldier, a priest,--God! what was there I would not be!
What came of it all?"--his voice rising into a weak, wiry cry. "There
was a tiny cancer, a little taint in my blood,--a trifle,--bah! a
nothing! My grandfather died a drunkard; my father ate opium.
I--Sharley, it's an old story to you."

She did not shame him by a look at him: her own face had the old pallor
and defiant clench of the jaws which Lufflin had seen. She drew his hand
under her arm, and kissed it passionately.

"It was no crime," she cried,--the old burden for many years.

A fine, sad smile crossed his face.

"Poor Sharley!" he said. "No,--no crime; for with the temptation was
given me a weak will. So they're gone now, hopes and chances in
life,--mind and body eaten away by that one animal thirst,--gone! Who
was to blame?"

"You told me," she said, eagerly, "that the stimulant in this air would
be all that you would require,--that it would effect a cure."

"Yes; but was it right that the fate of a man's soul should thus depend
on outward chances? Was I to blame for this hereditary plague in my
blood? Half of the lost millions who crowd the cities can plead against
the crime that dragged them down some inherited vice; theft,
drunkenness, butchery, were born with them, sucked in with their
mothers' milk. This world, that God called good, is but a gigantic mass
of corruption, foul with disease and pain, which man did not first
create, and never will conquer."

"Why do you talk of this to-night?" said Charlotte, shunning the storm,
as usual.

"Because I thank God, that, if He has made this failure, He will blot it
out. I liked to fancy once that my mother would waken out of her long
sleep into all her old loves and hates and fancies. I thank God now that
she knows nothing,--that for her, and for all of us, after death, lies
but an eternal blank."

In the pause, the dulled throb of the sea rose for an instant into a
fierce warning cry,