As he talked volubly and scatteringly to Helen, his shaking soul cried against fate. Why should Nature have chosen his Helen, the very flower of his heart, as a subject upon which to demonstrate her eccentric laws! Why, oh—but he must keep his tongue going to distract Helen from his distress—why, oh, why should atavism have thought to play its tricks and assert its prerogative here! Were there not enough other mongrel children in all the earth through whom heredity could establish her heartless caprices without the sacrifice of Helen and of Helen’s baby! Oh, the sarcasm of pitiless Chance, that the most dear, the _very_ highest, should be sacrificed to establish the law of the Persistence of the Lowest in the blood of men! Surely, in _this_ lesson, that law had been taught at an awful cost: and, as if to show that it had been taught beyond cavil, there was poked out from under the white coverlet a tight-shut baby fist that was almost black. * * * * * All things human must have an end,—and Mr. Phillips’ subterfuge was very human. His expedients finally failed, he had not a word more to say: and yet he was no nearer being prepared for the inevitable than before. The supreme test was come, and his spirit cowered before it. For the first time in his life he greeted flight as a deliverer, and decided to run away from danger. "Well, little woman, I must go and rid myself of the dust of travel;" and he was half way to the door when Helen’s weak voice arrested him. "Are you not going to notice the baby, daddy?" The pathos in that trembling question would have called him to go against all the Furies. Turning, he hesitated an instant, of which the double would have been fatal: but he saved the moment from disaster. "Dear me, I was about forgetting the youngster." He walked quickly around the bed and sat down beside the boy. Pulling the covering a little away, he took the tiny hand in his, and grandfather and grandson looked for the first time each into the face of the other. It was a negro baby: the colour that was of Ethiopia, the unmistakable nose, the hair that curled so tightly, the lips that were African, the large whites of the eyes. Verily a negro baby: and yet in an indefinable way a likeness to Helen, a caricature of Helen, a horrible travesty of Helen’s features in combination with—with whose? Not Hayward Graham’s. But whose, then? Helen’s and whose? ... Mr. Phillips could not answer his own question—he had never seen Guinea Gumbo. In a moment the smaller hand closed over the man’s finger as if in approval; but the man straightened up as if to get a freer breath, and glanced involuntarily at the pale mother. Her eyes were painfully intent upon him. Driving himself, he turned. Murmuring a nursery commonplace, he leaned over and kissed the little darkey as tenderly as he might.