he went on tapping his breast. "He's been my
anchor, my small, little anchor, but a mighty powerful one. He's saved
me from all sorts of hell, and I want to hand him the life he's saved in
return. I want to raise him to a great manhood, and hand him a future
that'll stagger half the world. And if I fail I'll have done all a
mortal man can."

The rustle of a woman's dress in the hallway behind them heralded
Millie's approach. Ross stood up hastily. He was just a shade relieved
at the interruption. In a moment the atmosphere was changed from Steve's
passionate urgency to the domestic lightness of a happy wife's presence.

"Why, Mac," she cried, as she stood framed in the doorway, "you two boys
still doping yourselves with smudge and tobacco smoke? That kiddie's
only just gone off to sleep. He's a terrible tyrant, Steve, and just
the sweetest ever."

She glanced quickly from one to the other, and in a moment the smile
died out of her eyes in response to the seriousness she beheld in the
faces confronting her.

"You've got around in the nick o' time," the husband said. "Steve's
going away--East. He'll be back in awhile. Maybe a year. Maybe more. And
when he comes back he--wants the boy. He wants to take him right away,
and to raise him as his own. He reckons he's kind of adrift now, and the
kiddie looks like handing him an anchor. He's yearning to make good for
him, in a way that, maybe we, with our own two, couldn't hope to. We're
guessing it's up to you. A year or so, and then you--hand him to his
'Uncle Steve.'"

Millie turned to the man who had battled for the boy's life. Her kindly
eyes were promptly lit with all a good woman's sympathy. She remembered
the man's passionate devotion to his own. She remembered the terrible
disaster that had overtaken him. Her thought went no further. At the
moment it was incapable of going further.

She turned to the husband awaiting her reply, and there was a suspicious
moisture in her clear smiling eyes.

"Say, Mac," she cried in her half tender, half humourous way, "by the
way you talk folk might guess you were scared to death of the wife who
didn't know better than to take you for better or worse. Steve doesn't
need to worry a thing. You know that. I don't know the rights of his
claim by the laws of the folks who're set to worry us. But there's God's
claim that don't need lawyers to make plain. Little Marcel, bless him,
is his. If he comes, night or day, one year's time or t