tastrophe. Instead of being innocent, she was black with guilt. Instead of hiding from the world the pitiful evidence of her unearned disaster, she was, instead, hiding the dreadful proof of her sin and her guilt. No wonder that when David Malua saw the child for which he had longed, he went forth and killed the author of his disgrace and then wiped out the score with his own blood.
And it was here that Dick Harris faced his own soul and cringed. It was no use to say "Well, what then! What is it to me? Why should I care?" The plain fact of the matter was that he did care. He cared desperately. He cared so damnably that the world was black to him and nothing existed but this awful revelation and the fact that, in spite of the horrible reality, he loved the girl with every fibre of his being; and that even with that, he hated her for having brought into his life so frightful a complication.
And now he began to wonder how much Carter McKnight knew or suspected. This might be the secret of the interest which he and the Morton girls evinced in Evalani and her child. Perhaps McKnight's brother had written him of his affair with the Hawaiian girl, and he was trying to find out about the child. Probably this was the reason that the girl was afraid of him. What the purpose of his interest in the child might be, since it obviously could not inherit, was hard to surmise; but that he
