Page:The Bondman; A New Saga (IA bondmannewsaga00cain).djvu/56

 glad light to be overcast! For all at once it smote Stephen like a blow on the brain, that though it was right that he should live with the woman, yet it was an awful thing that the child should continue to do so. Growing up in such a home, with such an example always present to his eyes, what would the child become? Soured, saddened, perhaps cunning, perhaps malicious; at least adapting himself, as his father had done before him, to the air he had to breathe. And thinking that little Sunlocks, now so sweet, so sunny, so artless, so innocent, must come to this, all the gall of Stephen Orry's fate rose to his throat again.

What could he do? Take little Sunlocks away? That was impossible, for he could not take himself away. Why had the child been born? Why had it not died? Would not the good God take it back to Himself even now, in all the sweetness of his childhood? No, no, no, not that either; and yet yes, yes, yes!

Stephen's poor slow brain struggled long with this thought, and at length a strange and solemn idea took hold of it:

Stephen Orry did not wriggle with his conscience, or if he cozened it at all, he made himself believe that it would not be sin but sacrifice to part with the thing he held dearest in all the world. Little Sunlocks was his life, but little Sunlocks must die! Better, better, better so!

And having thus determined, he went cautiously, and even cunningly, to work. When the little one had disappeared, he himself would never be suspected, for all the island would say he loved it too tenderly to do it a wrong, and he would tell everybody that he had taken it to some old body in the south who had wished to adopt a child. So with Sunlocks laughing and crowing astride his shoulder, he called at Kane Wade's house on Ballure one day, and told Bridget how he should miss the little chap, for Sunlocks was going down to the Calf very soon, and would not come home again for a long time, perhaps not for many a year, perhaps not until he was a big slip of a lad, and, maybe—who could tell?—he would never come back at all.

Thus he laid his plans, but even when they were complete he could not bring himself to carry them through, until one day, going up from the beach to sell a basket of crabs and eels, he found 'Liza drinking at the "Hibernian."

How she came by the money was at first his surprise, for