tell of any. But if she is in this
world still, perhaps it can be partly made up to her here. Only it is
not for me to do it, seeing what has happened since. Michael, that's
why you are going to my country now."

"Tell me everything," said Michael.

Then Stephen Orry, his deep voice breaking and his gray eyes burning
with the slow fire that had lain nineteen years asleep at the bottom
of them, told his son the story of his life--of Rachel and of her
father and her father's curse, of what she had given up and suffered
for him, and of how he had repaid her with neglect, with his mother's
contempt, and with his own blow. Then of her threat and his flight
and his coming to that island; of his meeting with Liza, of his base
marriage with the woman and the evil days they spent together; of
their child's birth and his own awful resolve in his wretchedness and
despair; and then of the woman's death, wherein the Almighty God had
surely turned to mercy what was meant for vengeance. All this he told
and more than this, sparing himself not at all. And Michael listened
with a bewildered sense of fear and shame, and love and sorrow, that
may not be described, growing hot and cold by turns, rising from his
seat and sinking back again, looking about the walls with a chill
terror, as the scenes they had witnessed seemed to come back to them
before his eyes, feeling at one moment a great horror of the man
before him, and at the next a great pity, and then clutching his
father's huge hands in his own nervous fingers.

"Now you know all," said Stephen Orry, "and why it is not for me to
go back to her. There is another woman between us, God forgive me,
and dead though she is, that woman will be there forever. But she,
who is yonder, in my own country, if she is living, is my wife. And
heaven pity her, she is where I left her--down, down, down among the
dregs of life. She has no one to protect and none to help her. She is
deserted for her father's sake, and despised for mine. Michael, will
you go to her?"

The sudden question recalled the lad from a painful reverie. He had
been thinking of his own position, and that even his father's name,
which an hour ago he had been ashamed to bear, was not his own to
claim. But Stephen Orry had never once thought of this, or that the
dead woman who stood between him and Rachel also stood between Rachel
and her son.

"Promise me, promise me," he cried, seeing one thing only--that
Michael was his so