But as he rose to go, putting the child, who had fallen asleep in his
arms, down on the bed, Mrs. Davis stopped him.

She stood straightening the sheet which covered Tom's face, creasing its
folds between her fingers, and pulling it a little on this side or that.

"Mr. Ward," she said, "he was drunk, Tom was."

"I know it," he answered gently.

"He went out with some money this forenoon," she went on; "he was to buy
some things for the young ones. He didn't mean to drink; he didn't mean
to go near the saloon. I _know_ it. Mrs. Shea, she came in a bit after he
went, and she said she seen him comin' out of the saloon, drunk. But he
didn't mean it. Then you brought him home. But, bein' started, preacher,
he could not help it, an' he'd been round to Dobbs's again, 'fore he seen
the fire."

"Yes," John said.

Still smoothing the straight whiteness of the sheet, she said, with a
tremor in her voice:--

"If he didn't want to, preacher--if he didn't mean to--perhaps it wasn't
a sin? and him dying in it!"

Her voice broke, and she knelt down and hid her face in the dead man's
breast. She did not think of him now as the man that beat her when he was
drunk, and starved the children; he was the young lover again. The dull,
brutal man and the fretful, faded woman had been boy and girl once, and