ittle Ellen. You cannot--you shall
not put such a stain upon that child. You love her, you--"

"Yes--too well to let that woman touch her ag'in if I kin help it!" The
fury of the merciless sea was in him now--the roar and pound of the
surf in his voice. "She'll be a curse to the child all her days; she'll
go back on her when she's a mind to just as she did on Archie. There
ain't a dog that runs the streets that would 'a' done that. She didn't
keer then, and she don't keer now, with him a-lyin' dead there. She
ain't looked at him once nor shed a tear. It's too late. All hell can't
stop me! Out of my way, I tell ye, doctor, or I'll hurt ye!"

With a wrench he swung back the doors and flung himself into the light.

"Come in, men! Isaac, Green--all of ye--and you over there! I got
something to say, and I don't want ye to miss a word of it! You, too,
Mr. Feilding, and that lady next ye--and everybody else that kin hear!

"That's my son, Barton Holt, lyin' there dead! The one I druv out o'
here nigh twenty year ago. It warn't for playin' cards, but on account
of a woman; and there she stands--Lucy Cobden! That dead boy beside him
is their child--my own grandson, Archie! Out of respect to the best
woman that ever lived, Miss Jane Cobden, I've kep' still. If anybody
ain't satisfied all they got to do is to look over these letters.
That's all!"

Lucy, with a wild, despairing look at Max, had sunk to the floor and
lay cowering beneath the lifeboat, her face hidden in the folds of her
cloak.

Jane had shrunk back behind one of the big folding doors and stood
concealed from the gaze of the astonished crowd, many of whom were
pressing into the entrance. Her head was on the doctor's shoulder, her
fingers had tight hold of his sleeve. Doctor John's arms were about her
frail figure, his lips close to her cheek.

"Don't, dear--don't," he said softly. "You have nothing to reproach
yourself with. Your life has been one long sacrifice."

"Oh, but Archie, John! Think of my boy being gone! Oh, I loved him so,
John!"

"You made a man of him, Jane. All he was he owed to you." He was
holding her to him--comforting her as a father would a child.

"And my poor Lucy," Jane moaned on, "and the awful, awful disgrace!"
Her face was still hidden in his shoulder, her frame shaking with the
agony of her grief, the words coming slowly, as if wrung one by one out
of her breaking heart.

"You did your duty, dear--all of it." His lips were clos