“He’ Squaker.”

“A Quaker?”

“Yes, Squaker.”

“Great heavens!” speaking under his breath and trembling visibly.  “What else do you know?”

“Illegitimate child.”

“What?” passing around the table, seizing him by the collar and shaking him.  “Say that again.”

“‘S true—­s’ help me!  What you c-c-care?”

“How do you know he is an illegitimate child—­I say?”

“I know—­that’s nuf!  Sh’tup and lemme g-g-go sleep.”

“Tell me, curse you!” shaking him until his teeth rattled.

He was too far gone to answer and fell under the table.  The judge kicked him, and with a muttered curse took up a glass of whisky, and tossing it down his throat, hurriedly left the cabin, and began to pace the deck in violent agitation.

This man who had so ruthlessly set a pitfall for his neighbor had suddenly tumbled into one which retributive justice had dug deep for himself!

“It must be true,” he was saying.  “It accounts for the strange feeling I had toward him when he asked me to help him do that infernal deed.  I could not understand it then, but it is plain enough now.  He is my son!  And I have not only transmitted a tainted life to him, but helped to damn him in its possession!  God! what irony!  Of course the quack never knew that I, too, am living under a false name!  I wonder if it is too late to stop him?  Yes—­it’s done, and he is miles away!  It’s almost daybreak now!  Whewwwh!  It’s horrible!”

He dashed his clenched fist on the railing of the vessel.  While he stood there, his mind ran back into the past.  He lived over again those passionate days when he had won and betrayed a young, beautiful, impressionable girl.  His heart beat with a swifter stroke as he remembered the excitement of their hurried flight from her parents, and the wild joy of their adventurous lives, and then sank again to its steady, hopeless throb as he recalled her penitence and misery after the birth of the boy, his consenting to marry her, the ceremony, the respite from self-reproach, the few happy months, the relapse into old bad habits, the sobered mother becoming a devout and faithful member of a Quaker church, his disgust at this, his quarrels with her and finally his desertion of her.  And then the whole subsequent series of adventures and disasters passed before him—­a moving panorama of dishonor and crime!  He paced the deck again; then he paused and leaned over the gunwale, listening to the water lapping the sides of the vessel.  Nothing could have been more astonishing to him than the sudden activity of his conscience.  It had been so long since he had experienced remorse that he believed himself incapable of it.  But suddenly a fierce and unendurable pang seized him.  To a man who had been long accustomed to feeling nothing in the contemplation of his deeds, but a dull consciousness of unworthiness, this sharp and terrible attack of shame and guilt was startling indeed.  He could