old his own among men.
Surely, she thought, God would not cripple mind, body and soul. God
would be content with testing her love by the twisted body. The mind and
soul would be--glorious!

Day by day, the young mother, creeping back into the warm, summer life,
watched for intelligence to awaken in the grim little face; the first
flying signal of the overpowering intellect that was to make recompense
for all that had been withheld.

The misshapen body was always swathed in disguising wrappings; even the
claw-like, groping hands were held under blankets when curious eyes
were near. Isa had won Joyce's everlasting gratitude by holding her
tongue regarding the child's bodily deformity; and the Hillcrest doctor,
who had been summoned when the fever grew, did not consider the
circumstance important enough to weigh on his memory when once the
payment for his services was, to his surprise, forthcoming.

But the sad, little old face with its fringe of straight black hair!
That must be public property, and its piteous appeal had no power beyond
the mother, to stay the cruel jest and jibe.

"Say, Jude," Peter Falstar had said in offering his maudlin
congratulations, "what's that you got up to your place--a baby or a
Chinese idol? That comes of having a handsome wife, what has notions
beyond what women can digest."

Jude did not take this pleasantry as one might suppose he would. His own
primitive aversion to the strange, deformed child made him weakly
sensitive. He recoiled from Falstar's gibe with a sneaking shame he
dared not defend by a physical outburst.

"He ain't a very handsome chap," he returned foolishly, "don't favour
either father or mother--hey?"

Gaston overheard this and other similar witticisms, and his blood rose
hot within him.

The cruelty and indelicacy of it all made him hate, where, heretofore,
he had but felt contempt.

He realized most keenly that in his lonely life among the pines the few
interests and friendships that he had permitted himself were deeper than
he had believed.

Jock Filmer, during the closer contact of daily labour, had become to
him a rude prototype of a Jonathan. They had found each other out, and
behind the screen that divided them from others, they held communion
sacred to themselves. They read together in Gaston's shack. They had, at
times, skimmed dangerously near the Pasts that both, for reasons of
their own, kept shrouded. After one of these close calls of confidence,