staring at his father. David just stood and looked for one long moment, and then, without a word, he turned and strode out of the room. I called after him, but he never turned, he never waited for me to tell him, but went off up the road into the mountains. You see, it never entered my mind that he would think what he did. I thought that he had just gone away to fight down his disappointment that the child was white. Whether he realized that I was Jean or whether he thought that it was only the working out of the white blood in us both, I did not know; but I thought that he would come back, when he had fought it down; and that then, when I had confessed and told him all, he would forgive me, for the sake of our child. But—he never came back."
It was a long time before she took up the story again. "You know what happened. And even then I could not grasp at first why he had done it. It never entered my mind that he could really doubt me. The momentary distrust that he had felt when he found McKnight here that day, had seemed so entirely eradicated and had really impressed me so little because of the utter absurdity of it, despising McKnight as I did, that the thought was not a factor in the case at all, so far as I was concerned. And then, when I learned what had happened, and suddenly and horribly I realized what he had thought, then my very life went out. Evidently the suspicion
