He hoped, in due season, that he would forget the wrongs he had done his wife, but they gathered strength with time. His sins walked with him through the sober lumber season; their memory drove him to the Black Cat; but his keener wit evolved a desire to "make good," as he termed it, in his relations with his daughter. He would so conduct himself with her that she, at least, should have nothing against him; and when age, sickness or accident befell him, he might turn to her and find refuge. Jared had always had some kind of sanctuary to flee to when overtaken by the results of his own evil nature. And now, by the impish words of Falstar's Billy, he was brought face to face with a possibility that staggered and unnerved him. Joyce and Jude, or Joyce and Jock Filmer, had been possibilities in Jared's distant future. But Joyce, already a woman, and that silent man Gaston who had come from a Past that he rigidly reserved for his own contemplation--Gaston, who lived among them as a traveller who might depart with the day into a Future Birkdale instinctively knew would hold no possible connection with St. Ange--Joyce and Gaston! Here was a situation indeed. Astonishment, anger, a dull fear and a determination to grip something out of it all for himself, swayed Jared as he sat tilted back, eyeing his daughter after the night's travail. He had come from his troubled thought imbued with a forced strength and singleness of purpose that made themselves felt by the quiet girl at the window. Joyce had brought no strength from her disturbed night. She was ill-fitted for the encounter. "By Jove," Jared suddenly ejaculated, "it's just struck me all of a heap, Joyce, that you're more than ordinary handsome." The girl raised her eyes with a dull show of surprise, then went on with her sewing. "With the learning I've given you over and above the other girls of the place, you _ought_ to do pretty good for yourself--and me--and no mistake. You always was a real grateful child, and you ain't one ever to forget the fifth commandment, Joyce--the only one with a promise." "The only one needing it," Joyce returned, with a bitterness for which she was sorry the moment after. But when Jared turned to quoting Scripture the girl grew rebellious. It was always distasteful to her to see, or hear, her father parade his superior knowledge. For some reason she always felt more ashamed of him then than at any other time. "You've got a nasty bit of a temper, Joyce." Jared's eye gleamed. "I hope you ain't going to take the first chance you get to shirk your duty to me." "I guess not, father, but I hate to be dragged to my duty; and I have a headache." "What give you that, Joyce?" "I don't know." Again the fair head bent above the coarse sewing in the trembling hands.