that had flashed across his clear sky. This morning the sun had
shone as usual and everything had seemed serene to him whose
life had always been easy--tonight he was wrestling in a hell of
his own making. Why had it come to him? He knew that his life
had been comparatively blameless. Why should this one sin, so
common throughout the world, recoil on him so terribly? Why
should he, among all the thousands of men who had sinned
similarly, be reserved for such a nemesis? Why of him alone
should such a reckoning be demanded? Surely the fault was not
his. Surely it lay with the man who had wrecked his mother's life
and broken her heart, the man who had neglected his duties and
repudiated his responsibilities and who had been faithful to neither
wife nor mistress. He was to blame. At the thought of his father
an access of rage passed over Craven and he cursed him in a
kind of dull fury. His fingers gripped the ground as if they were
about the throat of the man whom he hated with all the strength
of his being. The mystery of his father had always lain like a
shadow across his life. It was a subject that his mother had
refused to discuss. He shivered now when he realized the
agony his perpetual boyish questions must have caused her. His
petulance because "other fellows' fathers" could be produced
when necessary and were not shrouded away in unexplained
obscurity. He remembered her unfailing patience with him, the
consistent loyalty she had shown toward the husband who had
failed her so utterly, the courage with which she had taken the
absent father's place with the son whom she idolized. He
understood now her intolerant hatred of Japan and the Japanese,
an intolerance for which--in his ignorance--he had often teased
her. One memory came to him with striking vividness--a winter
evening, in the dawn of his early manhood, when they had been