to his own lanai.
But instead of returning to his typewriter, he sat down in a wicker chair and took his face in his hands and sat for a long time quietly, with his face hidden. Something had happened to his life,—something appalling; and he sat contemplating it almost with incredulity. It was as if some crushing calamity had fallen and he was at first too dazed even to take in its full import, and yet was conscious that it spelled chaos for him. And as he sat there the sight of the child's frightened face looking up from its mother's breast, seemed burned into the very fabric of his brain and the hiding of his own face could not shut it out. For the little face, instead of being that of a gross, malformed monster, mindless and bestial, had the beautifully clear-cut features and fair skin of an Anglo-Saxon child, with wide, intelligent blue eyes and the tow hair of so many American three-year-olds.
And as Dick sat there, with the light shut out by his sheltering hands, he tore his soul wide open and gazed at it. In the light of this revelation there was only one thing to think, only one thing that was positive, only one great petrifying verity which overtopped everything else in his life. Heretofore he had pitied the girl as an innocent sufferer from a tragedy in which she had become involved without being in any way to blame; but here suddenly he saw her now as the moving cause of the whole ca-
