"There is nothing more alive to me than my little Tom. I'm sorry you do not feel it so, Jerome," said matter-of-fact Charlotte. "I was not what you call a religious woman before he died; and when better thoughts come to me now, I am sure he brings them from the good Lord."
"Do you remember," he said, suddenly, "a habit the boy had of sitting on the sunny door-step, quite silent, by the hour?"
"I remember,"—turning her head away.
"It used to remind me of the days when I was a boy, on the shore of Lake Erie. My father was a squatter there. There was nothing I did not dare nor hope in those long dreams of what my life was to be. I would hunt, wrestle, fight, as no man had done before. I would be the first leader in the world,—a soldier, a priest,—God! what was there I would not be! What came of it all?"—his voice rising into a weak, wiry cry. "There was a tiny cancer, a little taint in my blood,—a trifle,—bah! a nothing! My grandfather died a drunkard; my father ate opium. I—Sharley, it's an old story to you."
She did not shame him by a look at him: her own face had the old pallor and defiant clench of the jaws which Lufflin had seen. She drew his hand under her arm, and kissed it passionately.
"It was no crime," she cried,—the old burden for many years.
A fine, sad smile crossed his face.
"Poor Sharley!" he said. "No,—no crime; for with the temptation was given me a weak will. So they're gone now, hopes and chances in life,—mind and body eaten away by that one animal thirst,—gone! Who was to blame?"
"You told me," she said, eagerly, "that the stimulant in this air would be all that you would require,—that it would effect a cure."
"Yes; but was it right that the fate of a man's soul should thus depend on outward chances? Was I to blame for this hereditary plague in my blood? Half of the lost millions who crowd the cities can plead against the crime that dragged them down some inherited vice; theft, drunkenness, butchery, were born with them, sucked in with their mothers' milk. This world, that God called good, is but a gigantic mass of corruption, foul with disease and pain, which man did not first create, and never will conquer."