“Poor Jud! There ain’t never a night but I pray the Lord to look after him and be a mother to him, but I do’ know. Sometimes of nights I dream about him. I see him drownin’ and callin’ to me, ‘Maw! Maw! save me!’ I wake up all of a sweat and tremblin’ like mad, but his voice goes on callin’ me. Sometimes it follers me all day long. I can see him out in that terrible big ocean—just one pore boy in all that sea with nobody to call to but his mother. Oh, God, sir, it’s no fun.” It would have been a mercy of a sort to end her nightmares with a word of assurance that her son would never die of drowning. But RoBards had his own children to consider. It seemed to him that a man must sometimes lie for posterity’s sake. This legacy of truth he had no right to entail upon his children. He must take his deed and all its consequences to hell with him. So there they stood, the murderer and the mother, staring at the very tomb of the boy; she thinking him at sea and he wondering whether or no he were dancing in infernal flames. Perhaps those cries his mother heard were not from the width of the Pacific but from the depths. “But what I was gittin’ at,” Mrs. Lasher went on, “was my daughter Molly—a pirty thing as ever was, but wild! She couldn’t see no future up here. Nobody wanted to marry her or be honest with her. And so one night she never come home at all. Where is she now? She’s in a deeper sea, I guess, than her brother. A man was sayin’ there’s eighteen thousand bad women in New York now—if you’ll excuse me mentionin’ it. Something tells me she’s one of ’em, but I never could find her if I went to look. I get lost so easy. She wouldn’t come back here if I did. Why should she? But why should all my children go wrong? I was wonderin’ if you could look for her or send somebody or do somethin’. I don’t know anybody. But you know the town and you’re a good honest man if ever they was one.” “If ever they was one!” RoBards wondered if ever indeed there had been an honest man. He had meant to be one, but he had lapsed into the profound. And nothing so filled him with self-horror as his new and protecting genius in hypocrisy. What a Judas he was—to stand here and let the mother of the boy he had slain praise him, and pour out praise upon him! What a hypocrite this house itself must be! What liars those stolid walls that embraced and concealed the dead, and even in the face of the denouncing thunderbolt kept their composure, and did not reveal the cadaver in their deep bosom. He promised to search for Molly, and the mother went away comforted, to pray for her girl and to pray for the boy, and to pray for her kind friend Mr. RoBards. And God took her prayers! had taken them and never given her a sign that the boy she asked all-seeing Heaven to guard a thousand leagues distant was lying immured at her feet! If Heaven could lie so blandly by keeping silence, no wonder men could perjure themselves by standing mute.