e, he would go out of his
life forever.

"I'll go straight to the devil then," he said sullenly. "That's where
I belong, a jail-bird at whom everybody except other jail-birds looks
askance. To think what I was once, and what I am now! It's enough to
drive a man mad! As for repenting, bah! Who'd believe that I really
repented, who'd give me a second chance on the faith of it? Not a
soul. Repentance won't blot out the past. It won't give me back my
wife whom I loved above everything on earth and whose heart I broke.
It won't restore me my unstained name and my right to a place among
honourable men. There's no chance for a man who has fallen as low as I
have. If Emily were living, I could struggle for her sake. But who'd
be fool enough to attempt such a fight with no motive and not one
chance of success in a hundred. Not I. I'm down and I'll stay down.
There's no climbing up again."

He celebrated his first day of freedom by getting drunk, although he
had never before been an intemperate man. Then, when the effects of
the debauch wore off, he took the train for Alliston; he would go home
and see little Joey once.

Nobody at the station where he alighted recognized him or paid any
attention to him. He was as a dead man who had come back to life to
find himself effaced from recollection and his place knowing him no
more. It was three miles from the station to where his sister lived,
and he resolved to walk the distance. Now that the critical moment
drew near, he shrank from it and wished to put it off as long as he
could.

When he reached his sister's home he halted on the road and surveyed
the place over its snug respectability of iron fence. His courage
failed him at the thought of walking over that trim lawn and knocking
at that closed front door. He would slip around by the back way;
perhaps, who knew, he might come upon Joey without running the
gauntlet of his sister's cold, offended eyes. If he might only find
the boy and talk to him for a little while without betraying his
identity, meet his son's clear gaze without the danger of finding
scorn or fear in it--his heart beat high at the thought.

He walked furtively up the back way between high, screening hedges of
spruce. When he came to the gate of the yard, he paused. He heard
voices just beyond the thick hedge, children's voices, and he crept as
near as he could to the sound and peered through the hedge, with a
choking sensation in his throat and a smart in h