To hear a name from the child's lips, the name he had dreamed of, was the one thought filling his mind.
"Let me be your father?" he said, his voice breaking.
"Sure I will," he answered. "There's my mummy, now!"
Around the jutting rocks came Tess. The red curls hung about her shoulders like a vivid velvet mantle, just as Frederick always dreamed of them. But her figure, in her simple morning dress, was fuller and more womanly. Upon her face was an expression of serenity and peace. Ah! The woman was even more lovely than the girl he'd married, and to the love-hungry man, on the great, gray slab of rock, she was infinitely desirable.
"Mummy," shouted the child, joyfully, "I've found a daddy for us. Petey and me found him."
Tess stared at the man, undisguised horror and dismay written in her eyes. She'd not seen Frederick since that day he'd urged her to marry Sandy Letts to escape Waldstricker, whose hands, he'd described, as stronger'n God's. She'd hardly heard of him after he and Madelene had gone West. She had long ago ceased to feel any desire for him. Indeed, she scarcely thought of him. During the full happy years since she left the shanty, under the loving tuition of Deforrest Young, the disgrace this man on the rocks had heaped upon her had covered its claws and lacerated her no more. But, at the sight of him, visions of the past reared themselves in her imaginative mind. Memory, suddenly, flung all the cruelties of his treatment of her into a kaleidoscopic jumble, and meddlesome fear presented numerous suggestions of calamity. A moment she stood as if turned to stone.
"Come on, come," Boy cried, tugging at her dress.
Frederick struggled to his feet, and held out his arms.
"Tessibel, oh, my Tess, be kind," he supplicated.
But she'd taken the child's hand and without answering, was making her way swiftly backward to the rock-path.