When Norton reached his room he locked the door and began to pace the floor, facing for the hundredth time the stunning situation which the presence of Helen had created.

To reveal to such a sensitive, cultured girl just as she was budding into womanhood the fact that her blood was tainted with a negro ancestor would be an act so pitifully cruel that every instinct of his nature revolted from the thought.

He began to realize that her life was at stake as well as his boy\'s. That he loved this son with all the strength of his being and that he only knew the girl to fear her, made no difference in the fundamental facts. He acknowledged that she was his. He had accepted the fact and paid the penalty in the sacrifice of every ambition of a brilliant mind.

He weighed carefully the things that were certain and the things that were merely probable. The one certainty that faced him from every angle was that Cleo was in deadly earnest and that it meant a fight for the supremacy of every decent instinct of his life and character.

Apparently she had planned a tragic revenge by luring the girl to his home, figuring on his absence for three months, to precipitate a love affair before he[Pg 260] could know the truth or move to interfere. A strange mental telepathy had warned him and he had broken in on the scene two months before he was expected.

And yet he couldn\'t believe that Cleo in the wildest flight of her insane rage could have deliberately meant that such an affair should end in marriage. She knew the character of both father and son too w............