kiest thing that ever happened to him."

Frederik raised one hand in instinctive protest. But he might as well
have sought to stem Niagara with a straw.

The doctor's strained nerves, his genuine grief, his dislike for the
dapper young man before him, combined to open wide the floodgates of
honest Scottish wrath. And he saw no cause to exercise self-control.

"You're in luck!" he growled. "The law could have compelled you to pay
some such munificent sum as four dollars a week for his maintenance.
You're safe from that now. And I congratulate you. It'll mean an extra
weekly quart of champagne or a brace of musical comedy seats for you.
The law is stringent and I was going to invoke it in your case. You
smashed a decent girl's life. You helped bring a nameless boy into a
world that would have made his life a hell as long as he lived. Just
because his father happened to be a yellow cur. And, in penalty for that
sin, the power and majesty of an outraged law would have assessed you
about one per cent of your yearly income. You're lucky."

Frederik winced as though he had been lashed across the face.

"I sometimes wonder," continued McPherson, urged to fresh vehemence by
sight of the effect he was scoring, "if hell holds a worse criminal or a
more mercilessly punished one than the man or woman who lets a little
child suffer needlessly--who _makes_ it suffer. And of all the suffering
that can be heaped upon a child, everything else is like a feather's
weight compared to sending it out in life with a name such as Willem
would have borne. Oh, but God's merciful when He finds little children
crying in the dark and leads them Home! Batholommey and the rest of them
sneer at me for sticking to the old hell-fire Calvin doctrines in these
days of pew-cushion religion. But I tell you, in all reverence, if
there's no hell for the people who torture children, then it's time the
Almighty turned awhile from pardoning sinners and built one."

"Don't worry," said Frederik shortly. "There is one. I know. I am in
it."

"'Mourner's bench talk,' eh? It's cheap. Penitence is always on the free
list. And in your case, as in most, it comes too late to do any good,
except to salve the penitent's feelings. Willem lived in the same house
with you for three years. All around him was Love. Except from the one
person whose sacred duty it was to give that Love. We pitied him. We
knew what he'd be facing if he lived. We made his childhood as happy as