iful blanket over
me. I thanked the night. I was grateful for the world's vicious classes,
so used to violence that they did not stare at me. I thanked the good
old rough crowd, the fist-pounding, the hard-talking, hoarse-voiced
loafers whose leers showed envy of my notoriety. And all the time I
thought of my child, of the blood of my fathers which, against all my
vows, had escaped again, and with the stimulant whirling in my head, I
determined to go back to the other end of town, to the house where I
knew this menace to the world lay smiling in its crib.

Yet when I had carried out all but the last chapter of my plans, when
I, like a thief, had slipped off into the night with my little daughter
in my arms, I found that I held her tight against my aching heart. At
last I knew fear--no longer the fear that I would not carry out my aim,
but fear that I would.

Again, out of the grass and down from the apple trees, drops of dew
glinted through the darkness like a thousand human eyes. Then suddenly
they all vanished, and as I walked along in the shadows I believed that
some one trod behind. I heard soft footsteps in the grass. I thought I
felt human breath upon my neck. Some one came behind me and yet I did
not dare to look, for I knew if I turned I would see the pale, thin face
of Mary, with her wistful eyes.

She was there--

I say, visible or not, she was there. I knew then, as if I had heard her
command, that I must go up the slope to the Judge's house and knock upon
the door. As I walked, she walked with me, watching me as I held the
sleeping baby in my arms, fearing perhaps that in my drunken course I
would fall.

And then--after I had been knocked senseless by the reporter's fist and
at last regained consciousness--then, after all the years, at that
terrible moment, a self-confessed murderer, a half-witted, half-sodden,
disheveled, driven, half-wild creature, what prank did Fate play? Who
stood there, gazing at me with full recognition in her eyes and begging
for my life? You know the story already. It was Margaret, the woman of a
thousand dreams,--the woman I had lost.

CHAPTER III

THE GHOST

You know, too, of that night. But this you do not know--that a mile out
of the village I sat on a boulder in a hillside pasture and watched the
flames of a terrible fire, without any knowledge of what house was
burning, and that it was not until a m