And his son, lying on the floor; the son Shaughnessy had thought dead; was it not a joyful reunion? Shaughnessy groaned aloud, for he had long writhed under the lash of conscience for this one thing. The rest of his ill-doing did not trouble him; it was for the blackest crime of all, alone, that he paid the penalty. And a bitter penalty he paid, for, whatever the seeming, outraged nature generally exacts her due. This man had heartlessly deserted a wife who had been devoted to him, despite his deviltry, and his helpless baby; deserted them more indifferently than most men would leave a dog. It was slow in coming, the time of reckoning, but the day came when the black heart and soul of Shaughnessy quivered under the lash. And the lash bit the deeper because of the need for repression, for the man writhed in secret. It was Shaughnessy who lived; the other man was dead; yet his foul ghost, with the memory of the foul deed he wrought, would not be laid. Shaughnessy, with a haggard glance at the motionless form on the floor, rose and walked uncertainly to an easy chair. He sat limply, a thin, white hand shading his eyes. He was oblivious to his surroundings, for the tumult of the past pounded in his brain. The tumult of the past! What a record had been his, this white-faced man with hunted eyes that now stared with a weird, fixed horror back into the past. They saw again another man than the Shaughnessy of vile political power; a younger man, in whom was no repression; the slave of wayward passions which marred lives other than his own. But what were wife and child? Merely incumbrances then, and, toward the last, hardly to be borne. And at the beginning? Why, the young man had once been respectable, and of the type to be pointed out as one destined to make his mark. Starting at the lowest round of a big business house, in a far-off city, it had not taken him long to prove his rare mettle, and at twenty-five he had reached a point further than most men attain in a lifetime. He had married a girl who believed in him as she believed in God--and she had been his dupe almost from the first. Supremely selfish, treacherous by nature and with a stealthy leaning toward the fleshpots, he began early to betray her trust in cold blood. She did not know of this; she knew only of his indulgence in liquor, increasing alarmingly, and his growing taste for cards. He had drammed moderately from a very early age; now he had a fiend's appetite, while his passion for the gaming table grew accordingly. She used to plead pitifully with him to eschew the practices. At first he laughed; later he sneered. Meanwhile his dissipation had not affected his business prospects as yet. Often rioting through a sleepless night, he was invariably at his desk in the morning, and his house was glad to command his services, for he was a veritable business genius.