Tom Smith, the ticket agent of the Station, looked as if some one had dashed water in his face, so startled was he; and Jared Birkdale simply stared open-mouthed at the spy in their midst. Then Tate, the proprietor, with the tact for which he was noted, went to the bar and began filling glasses.
St. Angé had received a shock; but St. Angé took its shocks in a peculiar way. It reserved its opinion until it had drunk on them.
Soon after the revelation Birkdale went home without a word having been spoken by any one on the subject so suddenly thrust upon their notice.
Jared had gone home to assure himself that Joyce had actually grown up to the extent of making Billy Falstar's remarks possible.
The afternoon's contemplation had caused him some astonishment.
Joyce _was_ grown up! Then he had slept on the knowledge, and dreamed of other days--a life apart, and beyond St. Angé.
St. Angé was a young place; it had no antiquity; almost all who lived there had had a setting in some other time and environment.
Jared recalled, in his thoughts that night, the beginnings of things in his life. Joyce's mother, and the babies who had come and gone like little ghosts, each one taking more of the wife's and mother's beauty and power.
Then that flight to the St. Angé lumber camp--it was really that, nothing less--the attending discomfort and paralyzing reality of what lay before!
Joyce was born the year after the settlement in the rough forest home, and then poor Mrs. Birkdale gave up the struggle.
She told Isa Tate that had the baby been a boy she would not have felt the way she did, but to face the life of another woman in her own life was more than she could bear.
Isa had tried to hold her to her responsibility: Isa had more than her own share of trouble--but Jane Birkdale had slipped away in the middle of the severest winter St. Angé had known for many a year and Isa had been obliged to have "an eye" to the baby Joyce. The small girl responded in health and joyousness, and Jared, when he was himself, had had the grace to be grateful.
As the years slipped by the fire of Jared's own little private hell aroused him to a consciousness that he deserved anything but a happy future.
He hoped, in due season, that he would forget the wrongs he had done his wife, but they gathered strength with time. His sins walked with him through the sober lumber season; their memory drove him to the Black Cat; but his keener wit evolved a desire to "make good," as he termed it, in his relations with his daughter.