He could not bear to see the grief that bled about the child from Immy’s eyes. She held it close under her down-showering curls and her tears streamed over it like rain from the eaves on snow. They could not waken roses or violets, but they eased the sky. She wept no longer the harsh brine of hate. Her grief was pure regret, the meek, the baffled yearning for things that cannot be in this helpless world. This was that doll that as a little girl she had held to her merely hinted breasts and had rocked to sleep and made fairy plans for. Now and then as she wagged her head over it, and boasted of its beauty, she would laugh a little and look up with a smile all awry and tear-streaked. And that was what broke RoBards: to see her battling so bravely to find something beautiful, some pretext for laughter in the poor rubbish of her life. He wondered that it did not break God’s heart to see such a face uplifted. Perhaps he could not see so far. Perhaps he turned away and rushed across the stars to hide from her, as RoBards fled from her. He hobbled into his library, that wolf-den of his, and he glared at it with hatred of everything in it. He lighted the kindling laid crosswise in the fireplace, to hear flames crackle, and to fight the dank chill. There were lawbooks piled and outspread about his desk. He flung them off the table to the floor. Laws! Human laws! On the shelves there were philosophies, histories, a Bible, a Koran, Confucius, the Talmud, Voltaire, a volume of Dr. Chirnside’s sermons. He tore them from their places and tossed them into the air to sprawl and scatter their leaves like snowflakes—and as full of wisdom. He flung a few of them into the fire, but they began to smother it. And somehow that made him laugh. The abysmal vanity of his temper! He was more foolish and futile than the books he insulted. Poor Job, whose God gave him to the devil to torture on a bet, without explaining to his servant why. Poor Kung-fu-tse trying to be wise. Poor Voltaire, with a mighty cachinnation and a heart full of pity for the victims of persecution. Poor Dr. Chirnside, anxiously floundering through the bogs of terror on the stilts of dogma. Poor Jud Lasher, lying there in the walls!—or where? This wrestling, Jacob-wise, with invisible angels or fiends, took his mind for a saving while from the unbearable spectacle of his own child’s immediate hell. There was silence again about the lonely house. By and by Patty came into the room to say: “She’s asleep. I gave her some drops. Too many, I’m afraid. And now—now what?” They leaned against the mantelpiece, tall shadows against the swirling flames. Her head and his were lost in the dark as if they were giants reaching to the clouds. And they were, indeed, in the clouds; lost there. They both thought of the same thing, of course: As usual with human kind, they were concerned about keeping something secret from somebody else. They wanted to make a decent concealment of their family shame.