don't know it, it's time you did, and I'm glad of the chance of setting
you straight. Joe Garland and you are brothers--half-brothers."

"It's a lie," Ford cried. "You don't mean it. Joe Garland's mother was
Eliza Kunilio." (Dr. Kennedy nodded.) "I remember her well, with her
duck pond and _taro_ patch. His father was Joseph Garland, the beach-
comber." (Dr. Kennedy shook his head.) "He died only two or three years
ago. He used to get drunk. There's where Joe got his dissoluteness.
There's the heredity for you."

"And nobody told you," Kennedy said wonderingly, after a pause.

"Dr. Kennedy, you have said something terrible, which I cannot allow to
pass. You must either prove or, or . . . "

"Prove it yourself. Turn around and look at him. You've got him in
profile. Look at his nose. That's Isaac Ford's. Yours is a thin
edition of it. That's right. Look. The lines are fuller, but they are
all there."

Percival Ford looked at the Kanaka half-breed who played under the _hau_
tree, and it seemed, as by some illumination, that he was gazing on a
wraith of himself. Feature after feature flashed up an unmistakable
resemblance. Or, rather, it was he who was the wraith of that other full-
muscled and generously moulded man. And his features, and that other
man's features, were all reminiscent of Isaac Ford. And nobody had told
him. Every line of Isaac Ford's face he knew. Miniatures, portraits,
and photographs of his father were passing in review through his mind,
and here and there, over and again, in the face before him, he caught
resemblances and vague hints of likeness. It was devil's work that could
reproduce the austere features of Isaac Ford in the loose and sensuous
features before him. Once, the man turned, and for one flashing instant
it seemed to Percival Ford that he saw his father, dead and gone, peering
at him out of the face of Joe Garland.

"It's nothing at all," he could faintly hear Dr. Kennedy saying, "They
were all mixed up in the old days. You know that. You've seen it all
your life. Sailors married queens and begat princesses and all the rest
of it. It was the usual thing in the Islands."

"But not with my father," Percival Ford interrupted.

"There you are." Kennedy shrugged his shoulders. "Cosmic sap and smoke
of life. Old Isaac Ford was straitlaced and all the rest, and I know
there's no explaining it, least of all to himself. He understood it no
more than you d