they would drift apart for a time--afraid of each other--but the growing
attraction they felt was strengthening after the three or four years
wherein an unconscious foundation had been laid.

Then Gaston, too, realized that he had banked much upon the marriage he
had brought about between Jude and Joyce. In saving himself from
temptation, he felt he had sacrificed the girl, unless he could bring
into her life an element that would satisfy her blind gropings.

To argue that in saving himself he had saved her, was no comfort. He had
not been called upon to elect himself arbiter of Joyce's future. No; to
put it baldly, in his loneliness he had dabbled in affairs that did not
concern him--and he must pay for his idiocy.

To that end he had, at first, put himself and his private funds at
Jude's disposal. He had had hopes that by so doing he might help Jude to
decent manliness. But that hope soon died. Jude, lazy with the inertness
of a too sharply defined ancestry, became rapidly a well-developed
parasite.

Even when he accepted the contract to build Ralph Drew's house, he had
done so from two motives. By this means he could, he found, command more
of Gaston's money than in any other way, and by assuming the
responsibility he placed himself on a social pinnacle that satisfied his
vanity. He became a man of importance. Gaston and Filmer, glad with the
intelligence of men who know the value of work, took the actual burden
upon themselves. Lauzoon had the empty glory; they had the blessing of
toil that brought their faculties into play, and gave them relief from
somberer thoughts. But Gaston was too normal a man not to consider the
gravity of conditions that were developing. His hopes of Jude had long
ago sunk into a contemptuous understanding of the shiftless fellow. He
had, however, believed that the hold he had upon him insured a
comparatively easy life for Joyce. This, too, he now saw was a false
belief.

He knew the girl. He knew that mere housing and assured food were little
to her, if deeper things failed.

It was this essentially spiritual side of Joyce that had interested him
and appealed to him from the beginning.

One by one he gave up his hopes for her happiness. He saw that Jude was
impossible long before Joyce did; then he put his faith in the little
child--and now that had failed! Poor girl! he thought; and in the inner
chamber of his shack with the doors and shutters barred, the pistol
lying at hand upo