dale gave up the struggle.

She told Isa Tate that had the baby been a boy she would not have felt
the way she did, but to face the life of another woman in her own life
was more than she could bear.

Isa had tried to hold her to her responsibility: Isa had more than her
own share of trouble--but Jane Birkdale had slipped away in the middle
of the severest winter St. Ange had known for many a year and Isa had
been obliged to have "an eye" to the baby Joyce. The small girl
responded in health and joyousness, and Jared, when he was himself, had
had the grace to be grateful.

As the years slipped by the fire of Jared's own little private hell
aroused him to a consciousness that he deserved anything but a happy
future.

He hoped, in due season, that he would forget the wrongs he had done his
wife, but they gathered strength with time. His sins walked with him
through the sober lumber season; their memory drove him to the Black
Cat; but his keener wit evolved a desire to "make good," as he termed
it, in his relations with his daughter.

He would so conduct himself with her that she, at least, should have
nothing against him; and when age, sickness or accident befell him, he
might turn to her and find refuge. Jared had always had some kind of
sanctuary to flee to when overtaken by the results of his own evil
nature.

And now, by the impish words of Falstar's Billy, he was brought face to
face with a possibility that staggered and unnerved him.

Joyce and Jude, or Joyce and Jock Filmer, had been possibilities in
Jared's distant future. But Joyce, already a woman, and that silent man
Gaston who had come from a Past that he rigidly reserved for his own
contemplation--Gaston, who lived among them as a traveller who might
depart with the day into a Future Birkdale instinctively knew would hold
no possible connection with St. Ange--Joyce and Gaston! Here was a
situation indeed.

Astonishment, anger, a dull fear and a determination to grip something
out of it all for himself, swayed Jared as he sat tilted back, eyeing
his daughter after the night's travail.

He had come from his troubled thought imbued with a forced strength and
singleness of purpose that made themselves felt by the quiet girl at the
window.

Joyce had brought no strength from her disturbed night. She was
ill-fitted for the encounter.

"By Jove," Jared suddenly ejaculated, "it's just struck me all of a
heap, Joyce, that you're more than ordinary hands