"What's the matter with mother?" he asked, quickly. "Tell me!"
The child shook her head.
"She cries most all the time," she replied. "And when I ask her what the matter is, she just shakes her head and says, 'Nothing, dearie. Mother's tired.' But people don't cry because they're tired, do they, daddy?"
He did not answer. Head sunk in hands, the bitterness of it all—the awful, ghastly, horror of the things that he had done—was obsessing him body and soul and brain and heart. The fires of the uttermost hell were flaring through his very being.
Then it was that the woman beckoned to the child of the man that belonged to her.
"Come here, dear," she said, voice modulated. The man might not hear yet.
The child hesitated.
"I'd rather not," she replied.
The woman bent forward, swiftly, undulatingly, as a snake strikes. She seized the child, clasping her to her. And once, twice, thrice, she kissed her, on the lips…. The man awoke. He staggered to his feet…. Through the door came Blake. He, too, saw; and while he did not understand all, he understood enough.
Across the room he sprang. He tore the child from the now yielding arms of the woman! Holding tight against him the little one that he loved as his own, he turned savagely upon the man who had once been his friend.