ked down
coyly as she smiled into his gray face.

"Great God," he whispered, "were you born a--" he stopped, ashamed of
the word in his mouth.

The woman kept twinkling her indecent eyes at him and put her head on
one side as she replied: "Whatever I am, I'm the wife of Judge Van Dorn;
so I'm quite respectable now--whatever I was once. Isn't that lawvly,
dawling!" She began talking in her baby manner.

Her husband was staring at her with doubt and fear and weak, footless
wrath playing like scurrying clouds across his proud, shamed face.

"Oh, Margaret, tell me the truth," he moaned, as the fear of the truth
baffled him--a thousand little incidents that had attracted his notice
and passed to be stirred up by a puzzled consciousness came rushing into
his memory--and the doubt and dread overcame even his hate for a moment
and he begged. But she laughed, and scouted the idea and then called out
in anguish:

"Why--why have you a child to love--to love and live for even if you
cannot be with her--why can I have none?"

Her voice had broken and she felt she was losing her grip on herself,
and she knew that her time was limited, that her fortifications were
about to crumble. She sat down before her husband.

"Tom," she said coldly, "no matter why I'm fond of Kenyon Adams--that's
my business; Lila is your business, and I don't interfere, do I? Well,"
she said, looking the man in the eyes with a hard, mean, significant
stare, "you let the boy alone--do you understand? Do what you please
with Grant or Jasper or the old man; but Kenyon--hands off!"

She rose, slipped quickly to the stairway, and as she ran up she called,
"Good night, dawling." Before he was on his feet he heard the lock click
in her door, and with a horrible doubt, an impotent rage, and a mantling
shame stifling him, he went upstairs and from her distant room she heard
the bolt click in the door of his room. And behind the bolted doors
stood two ghosts--the ghosts of rejected children, calling across the
years, while the smudge of the extinguished torch of life choked two
angry hearts.

CHAPTER XXXVIII

GRANT ADAMS VISITS THE SONS OF ESAU

"My dear," quoth the Doctor to his daughter as he sat poking his feet
with his cane in her little office at the Kindergarten, after they had
discussed Lila's adventure of the night before, "I saw Tom up town this
morning and he didn't seem to be exactly happy. I says, 'Tom, I hear you
beat God at his own gam