who were broken-hearted and a sister whose pride had
suffered more than her heart.

He had never seen them since, but he knew what had happened in his
absence. His wife had died two months later, leaving behind her a baby
boy; his father had died within the year. He had killed them; he, John
Churchill, who loved them, had killed them as surely as though his
hand had struck them down in cold blood. His sister had taken the
baby, his little son whom he had never seen, but for whom he had
prepared such a birthright of dishonour. She had never forgiven her
brother and she never wrote to him. He knew that she would have
brought the boy up either in ignorance of his father's crime or in
utter detestation of it. When he came back to the world after his
imprisonment, there was not a single friendly hand to clasp his and
help him struggle up again. The best his friends had been able to do
for him was to forget him.

He was filled with bitterness and despair and a gnawing hatred of the
world of brightness around him. He had no place in it; he was an ugly
blot on it. He was a friendless, wifeless, homeless man who could not
so much as look his fellow men in the face, who must henceforth
consort with outcasts. In his extremity he hated God and man, burning
with futile resentment against both.

Only one feeling of tenderness yet remained in his heart; it centred
around the thought of his little son.

When he left the prison he had made up his mind what to do. He had a
little money which his father had left him, enough to take him west.
He would go there, under a new name. There would be novelty and
adventure to blot out the memories of the old years. He did not care
what became of him, since there was no one else to care. He knew in
his heart that his future career would probably lead him still further
and further downward, but that did not matter. If there had been
anybody to care, he might have thought it worthwhile to struggle back
to respectability and trample his shame under feet that should
henceforth walk only in the ways of honour and honesty. But there was
nobody to care. So he would go to his own place.

But first he must see little Joey, who must be quite a big boy now,
nearly ten years old. He would go home and see him just once, even
although he dreaded meeting aversion in the child's eyes. Then, when
he had bade him good-bye, and, with him, good-bye to all that remained
to make for good in his desolated existenc