reathing reality, and the
child was the living link between its mother and himself. The longer he
held the little one, the more intense grew his desire for Tess. At
length this demand urged him to ask,

"Where's your mother?"

"She's home, just up there in that house. She's working."

"You haven't any father?" the man queried at last. A lump rose in his
throat and choked him. What had the child been told about him, he
wondered.

"Oh, yes, I have somewhere's, but I got another up in the sky, away back
in the clouds, Mummy says. And he's awful glad when I'm good, and he
cries like anything, when I'm bad. So I try to be good, and sometimes
I'm gooder'n gold."

To hear a name from the child's lips, the name he had dreamed of, was
the one thought filling his mind.

"Let me be your father?" he said, his voice breaking.

"Sure I will," he answered. "There's my mummy, now!"

Around the jutting rocks came Tess. The red curls hung about her
shoulders like a vivid velvet mantle, just as Frederick always dreamed
of them. But her figure, in her simple morning dress, was fuller and
more womanly. Upon her face was an expression of serenity and peace. Ah!
The woman was even more lovely than the girl he'd married, and to the
love-hungry man, on the great, gray slab of rock, she was infinitely
desirable.

"Mummy," shouted the child, joyfully, "I've found a daddy for us. Petey
and me found him."

Tess stared at the man, undisguised horror and dismay written in her
eyes. She'd not seen Frederick since that day he'd urged her to marry
Sandy Letts to escape Waldstricker, whose hands, he'd described, as
stronger'n God's. She'd hardly heard of him after he and Madelene had
gone West. She had long ago ceased to feel any desire for him. Indeed,
she scarcely thought of him. During the full happy years since she left
the shanty, under the loving tuition of Deforrest Young, the disgrace
this man on the rocks had heaped upon her had covered its claws and
lacerated her no more. But, at the sight of him, visions of the past
reared themselves in her imaginative mind. Memory, suddenly, flung all
the cruelties of his treatment of her into a kaleidoscopic jumble, and
meddlesome fear presented numerous suggestions of calamity. A moment she
stood as if turned to stone.

"Come on, come," Boy cried, tugging at her dress.

Frederick struggled to his feet, and held out his arms.

"Tessibel, oh, my Tess, be kind," he supplicated.

But she'd ta