Page:A Good Woman (1927).pdf/360

 learned a lot since I last saw her. . . a hell of a lot. There's a lotta women like her. . . especially American women—that don't know their place."

The baby stopped screaming, sobbed for a moment, and then began again.

"It wasn't her piousness that drove me away. I could have managed that. It was her way of meddlin'."

Philip stopped short and turned, looking at his father. "Then you were running away from us when you fell and hit your head?"

"I wasn't runnin' away from you."

Philip stood in front of the chair. "And you didn't lose your memory at all, did you?"

Jason looked up at him with an expression of astonishment. "No . . . of course not. D'you mean to say she never told you the truth . . . even you . . . my own son?"

"No . . . I guess she was trying to protect you . . . and made me believe my father wasn't the kind to run away." (The cries of the baby had begun to beat upon his brain like the steel hammers of the Mill.)

"Protect me, hell! It was to protect herself. She didn't want the Town to think that any man would desert her. Oh, I know your Ma, my boy. And it would have took a hero or a nincompoop to have stuck with her in those days." He knocked the ash from his cigar, and shook his head sadly. "But I oughtn't to have run away on your account. If I'd 'a' stuck it out, you wouldn't have got mixed up in the missionary business or with Naomi either. You wouldn't be walkin' up and down with that squallin' brat—at any rate, it wouldn't be Naomi's brat. I guess the mission-