'Maud left home to return to Wanabeen a week ago,' wrote her father. 'What can have happened?'
Jim Dennis knew what had happened. His heart told him that she had left him and deserted her child. He did not answer the letter, and another came.
Maud's father wrote to say his daughter was a disgrace to her family. He heard she had gone to England, but he did not know with whom. He advised him to think of her as dead and cast her memory out of his life, as he meant to do.
'She is not worth a thought from such a man as you, Jim Dennis. You are worth a hundred times more than she is. I am sorry for you, very sorry. Can we help you at all with the little one? If so, please say in what way. I wish to heaven she had never been born to bring this disgrace upon us all.'
Jim Dennis wanted no help, and wrote to that effect. 'I will find her out, and the man who has ruined our lives, and then there will be a heavy settling day between us. As for blotting her out of my memory, I cannot do that yet, but the day may come when it will be done. If ever such a day arrives, there will be no mercy for the man or the woman—at present I have some for her.'
It took him a long time to write this letter. He was not much of a hand at letter writing, and his thoughts did not flow freely. Living his lonely life, he did not hear for a long time the story his wife had circulated in Sydney.
She had not only deserted him, but she had cast aspersions upon his character. She had blackened his name and accused him of many sins. To hide her own shame she threw blame for it upon him. Nay, she even went so far as to repudiate her own son, and say he was not her child. No outrage to the feelings of such a man as Jim Dennis could have been worse. He heard faint rumours of such things, but he refused to believe them. However, the truth was forced home to him by a friend from Sydney, who thought it better he should know the facts and try to refute them.
But Jim Dennis refused to do so. He bore his second blow as he did the first, in silence, but he brooded long and deep over his wrongs. He hardened his heart and cursed the mother of his child.
He clenched his hands and swore a solemn oath the child should never hear its mother's name. Nay, more, he would, if necessary, uphold what his wife had said, and make Willie think he had another mother who was dead.
At all events, the lad should never learn, if he could possibly guard it from him, of the disgrace that had been put upon them both. Time had softened the blow to Jim Dennis, but had not healed it, and he was thinking of the bitter past as he sat by the bedside of his son.