Day by day, the young mother, creeping back into the warm, summer life, watched for intelligence to awaken in the grim little face; the first flying signal of the overpowering intellect that was to make recompense for all that had been withheld. The misshapen body was always swathed in disguising wrappings; even the claw-like, groping hands were held under blankets when curious eyes were near. Isa had won Joyce's everlasting gratitude by holding her tongue regarding the child's bodily deformity; and the Hillcrest doctor, who had been summoned when the fever grew, did not consider the circumstance important enough to weigh on his memory when once the payment for his services was, to his surprise, forthcoming. But the sad, little old face with its fringe of straight black hair! That must be public property, and its piteous appeal had no power beyond the mother, to stay the cruel jest and jibe. "Say, Jude," Peter Falstar had said in offering his maudlin congratulations, "what's that you got up to your place--a baby or a Chinese idol? That comes of having a handsome wife, what has notions beyond what women can digest." Jude did not take this pleasantry as one might suppose he would. His own primitive aversion to the strange, deformed child made him weakly sensitive. He recoiled from Falstar's gibe with a sneaking shame he dared not defend by a physical outburst. "He ain't a very handsome chap," he returned foolishly, "don't favour either father or mother--hey?" Gaston overheard this and other similar witticisms, and his blood rose hot within him. The cruelty and indelicacy of it all made him hate, where, heretofore, he had but felt contempt. He realized most keenly that in his lonely life among the pines the few interests and friendships that he had permitted himself were deeper than he had believed. Jock Filmer, during the closer contact of daily labour, had become to him a rude prototype of a Jonathan. They had found each other out, and behind the screen that divided them from others, they held communion sacred to themselves. They read together in Gaston's shack. They had, at times, skimmed dangerously near the Pasts that both, for reasons of their own, kept shrouded. After one of these close calls of confidence, they would drift apart for a time--afraid of each other--but the growing attraction they felt was strengthening after the three or four years wherein an unconscious foundation had been laid. Then Gaston, too, realized that he had banked much upon the marriage he had brought about between Jude and Joyce. In saving himself from temptation, he felt he had sacrificed the girl, unless he could bring into her life an element that would satisfy her blind gropings. To argue that in saving himself he had saved her, was no comfort. He had not been called upon to elect himself arbiter of Joyce's future. No; to put it baldly, in his loneliness he had dabbled in affairs that did not concern him--and he must pay for his idiocy.