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Rh came. Meeting blackmail, paying blackmail for as long as Wassaquam had been in the house, for as long as it took to make the once muscular, powerful figure of the sailor who threatened to "talk" into the swollen, whiskey-soaked hulk of the man dying now on the lounge.

For his state that day, the man blamed Benjamin Corvet. Alan, forcing himself to touch the swollen face, shuddered at thought of the truth underlying that accusation. Benjamin Corvet's act—whatever it might be that this man knew—undoubtedly had destroyed not only him who paid the blackmail but him who received it; the effect of that act was still going on, destroying, blighting. Its threat of shame was not only against Benjamin Corvet; it threatened also all whose names must be connected with Corvet's. Alan had refused to accept any stigma in his relationship with Corvet; but now he could not refuse to accept it. This shame threatened Alan; it threatened also the Sherrills. Was it not because of this that Benjamin Corvet had objected to Sherrill's name appearing with his own in the title of the ship-owning firm? And was it not because of this that Corvet's intimacy with Sherrill and his comradeship with Constance had been alternated by times in which he had frankly avoided them both? What Sherrill had told Alan and even Corvet's gifts to him had not been able to make Alan feel that without question Corvet was his father, but now shame and horror were making him feel it; in horror at Corvet's act—whatever it might be—and in shame at Corvet's cowardice, Alan was thinking of Benjamin Corvet as his father. This shame, this horror, were his inheritance.