k you here, sir," he said, in his broken
English.

"Call me Michael," the lad answered, and then they went into the hut.

The place was not much more cheerful than of old, but still dark,
damp and ruinous; and Michael Sunlocks, at the thought that he
himself had been born there, and that his mother had lived her
shameful life and died her dishonored death there, found the gall
again in his throat.

"I have something that I shall have to say to you," said Stephen
Orry, "but I cannot well speak English. Not all the years through I
never shall have learn it." And then, as if by a sudden thought, he
spoke six words in his native Icelandic, and glanced quickly into the
face of Michael Sunlocks.

At the next instant the great rude fellow was crying like a child. He
had seen that Michael understood him. And Michael, on his part,
seemed at the sound of those words to find something melt at his
heart, something fall from his eyes, something rise to his throat.

"Call me Michael," he said once more. "I am your son;" and then they
talked together, Stephen Orry in the Icelandic, Michael Sunlocks in
English.

"I've not been a good father to you, Michael, never coming to see you
all these years. But I wanted you to grow up a better man than your
father before you. A man may be bad, but he doesn't like his son to
feel ashamed of him. And I was afraid to see it in your face,
Michael. That's why I stayed away. But many a time I felt hungry
after my little lad, that I loved so dear and nursed so long, like
any mother might. And hearing of him sometimes, and how well he
looked, and how tall he grew, maybe I didn't think the less about him
for not coming down upon him to shame him."

"Stop, father, stop," said Michael Sunlocks.

"My son," said Stephen Orry, "you are going back to your father's
country. It's nineteen years since he left it, and he hadn't lived a
good life there. You'll meet many a one your father knew, and, maybe,
some your father did wrong by. He can't undo the bad work now.
There's a sort of wrong-doing there's no mending once it's done, and
that's the sort his was. It was against a woman. Some people seem to
be sent into this world to be punished for the sins of others. Women
are mostly that way, though there are those that are not; but she was
one of them. It'll be made up to them in the other world; and if she
has gone there she has taken some of my sins along with her own--if
she had any, and I never heard