One bright, crisp morning a few days later, after her uncle had ridden his old horse, in clanking, trace-chain harness, off to his field to do some ploughing, Virginia stole out unnoticed and went over to Ann Boyd's. The door of the farm-house stood open, and in the sitting-room the girl saw Ann seated near a window hemming a sheet.

"I see from your face that you've had more news," the old woman said, as she smiled in greeting. "Sit down and tell me about it. I'm on this job and want to get through with it before I put it down."

"I got a letter this morning," Virginia complied, "from a woman down there who said she was my mother's nurse. The operation was very successful, and she is doing remarkably well. The surgeon says she will have no more trouble with her affliction. It was only on the surface and was taken just in time."

"Ah, just in time!" Ann held the sheet in her tense hands for a moment, and then crushed it into her capacious lap. "Then she's all right."

"Yes, she is all right, Mrs. Boyd. In fact, the doctor says she will soon be able to come home. The simple treatment can be continued here under their directions till she is thoroughly restored."

There was silence. Ann's face looked as hard as stone. She seemed to be trying to conquer some rising emotion, for she coughed, cleared her throat, and swallowed. Her heavy brows were drawn together, and the muscles of her big neck stood up under her tanned skin like tent-cords drawn taut from pole to stake.

"I may as well tell you one particular thing and be done with it," she suddenly gulped. "I don't believe in deception of any sort whatever. I hate your mother as much as I could hate anything or anybody. I want it understood between us now on the spot that I done what I did for you, not for her. It may be Old Nick in me that makes me feel this way at such a time, but, you see, I understand her well enough to know she will come back primed and cocked for the old battle. The fear of death didn't alter her in her feelings towards me, and, now that she's on her feet, she will be worse than ever. It's purty tough to have to think that I put her in such good fighting trim, but I did it."

"I am afraid you are right about her future attitude," Virginia sighed, "and that was one reason I did not want help to come through you."

"That makes no odds now," Ann said, stoically. "What's done is done. I'm in the hands of two powers—good and evil—and here lately I never know, when I get out of bed in the morning, whether I'm going to feel the cool breath of one or the hot blast of the other. For months I had but one desire, and that was to see you, you poor, innocent child, breathing the fumes of the hell I sunk into; and just as my hopes were about to be realized the other power caught me up like a swollen river and swept me right the other way. Luke King really caused it. Child, since God made the world He never put among human beings a man with a finer soul. That poor, barefoot mountain boy that I picked up and sent off to school has come back—like Joseph that was dropped in a pit—a king among men. Under the lash of his inspired tongue I had to rise from my mire of hatred and do my duty. I might not have been strong enough in the right way if—if I hadn't loved him so much, and if he hadn't told me, poor boy, with tears in his eyes and voice, that you were the only woman in the world for him, and that his career would be wrecked if he lost you. I let him leave me without making promises. I was mad and miserable because I was about to be thwarted. But when he was gone I got to thinking it over, and finally I couldn't help myself, and acted. I determined, if possible, to pull you back from the brink you stood on and give you to him, that you might live the life that I missed."

Virginia sank into a chair. She was flushed from her white, rounded neck to the roots of her hair.

"Oh, I didn't deserve it!" she cried. "I have remained silent when my mother was heaping abuse upon you. I made no effort to do you justice when your enemies were crying you down. Oh, Mrs. Boyd, you are the best and most unselfish woman that ever lived."

"No, I am not that," Ann declared, firmly. "I'm just like the general run of women, weak and wishy-washy, with dry powder in my make-up that anybody can touch a match to. There is no counting on what I'll do next. Right now I feel like being your stanch friend, but I really don't know but what, if your mammy hemmed me in a corner, I'd even throw up to her what you did that night. I say I don't know what notion might strike me. She can, with one word or look of hers, start perdition's fire in me. I don't know any more than a cat what made me go contrary to my plans that night. It wasn't in a thousand miles of what I wanted to do, and having Jane Hemingway come back here with a sound body and tongue of fire isn't what I saved money to pay for. If forgiveness is to be the white garment of the next life, mine will be as black as logwood dye."

"The pretty part of it all is that you don't know yourself as you really are," Virginia said, almost smiling in her enthusiasm. "Since I've seen the beautiful side of your character I've come almost to understand the eternal wisdom even in human ills. But for your hatred of my mother, your kindness to me would not be so wonderful. For a long time I had only my mother to love, but now, Mrs. Boyd, somehow, I have not had as great anxiety about her down there as I thought I would have. Really, my heart has been divided between you two. Mrs. Boyd, I love you. I can't help it—I love you."

Ann suddenly raised her sheet and folded it in her lap. Her face had softened; there was a wonderful spiritual radiance in her eyes.

"It's powerful good and sweet of you to—to talk that way to a poor, despised outcast like I am. I can't remember many good things being said about me, and when you say you feel that way towards me, why—well, it's sweet of you—that's all, it's sweet and kind of you."

"You have made me love you," Virginia said, simply. "I could not help myself."

Ann looked straight at the girl from her moist, beaming eyes.

"I'm a very odd woman, child, and I want to tell you what I regard as the oddest thing about me. You say you feel kind towards me, and, and—love me a little. Well, ever since that night in that young scamp's room, when I came on you, crouched down there in your misery and fear, looking so much like I must 'a' looked at one time away back when not a spark of hope flashed in my black sky—ever since I saw you that way, helpless as a fresh violet in the track of a grazing bull, I have felt a yearning to draw you up against this old storm-beaten breast of mine and rock you to sleep. That's odd, but that isn't the odd thing I was driving at, and it is this, Virginia—I don't care a snap of my finger about my own child. Think of that. If I was to hear of her death to-night it wouldn't be any more to me than the news of the death of any stranger."

"That is queer," said Virginia, thoughtfully.

"Well, it's only nature working, I reckon," Ann said. "I loved her as a baby—in a natural way, I suppose—but when she went off from me, and by her going helped—child though she was—to stamp the brand on me that has been like the mark of a convict on my brow ever since—when she went off, I say, I hardened my heart towards her, and day after day I kept it hard till now she couldn't soften it. Maybe if I was to see her in trouble like you were in, my heart would go out to her; but she's independent of me; the only thing I've ever heard of her is that she cries and shudders at the mention of my name. She shudders at it, and she'll go down to her grave shuddering at it. She'll teach her children not to mention me. No, I'll never love her, and that's why it seems odd for me to feel like I do about you. Heaven knows, it seems like a dream when I remember that you are Jane Hemingway's child and the chief pride of her hard life. As for my own girl, she's full grown now, and has her natural plans and aspirations, and is afraid my record will blight them. I don't even know how she looks, but I have in mind a tall, stiff-necked, bony girl inclined to awkwardness, selfish, grasping, and unusually proud. But I can love as well as hate, though I've done more hating in my life than loving. There was a time I thought the very seeds of love had dried up in me, but about that time I picked up Luke King. Even as a boy he seemed to look deep into the problems of life, and was sorry for me. Somehow me and him got to talking over my trouble as if he'd been a woman, and he always stood to me and pitied me and called me tender names. You see, nobody at his home understood him, and he had his troubles, too, so we naturally drifted together like a mother and son pulled towards one another by the oddest freak of circumstances that ever came in two lives. We used to sit here in this room and talk of the deepest questions that ever puzzled the human brain. Our reason told us the infinite plan of the universe must be good, but we couldn't make it tally with the heavy end of it we had to tote. He was rebellious against circumstances and his lazy old step-father's conduct towards him, and he finally kicked over the traces and went West. Well, he had his eyes open out there, and came back with the blaze of spiritual glory in his manly face. He started in to practise what he was preaching, too. He yanked out of his pocket the last dollar of his savings and forked it over to the last people on earth to deserve it. That made me so mad I couldn't speak to him for a while, but now I'm forced to admit that the sacrifice hasn't harmed him in the least. He's plunging ahead down there in the most wonderful way, and content—well, content but just for one thing. I reckon you know what that is?"

Ann paused. Virginia was looking out through the open doorway, a flush creeping over her sensitive face. She started to speak, but the words hung in her throat, and she only coughed.

"Yes, you know as well as I do," Ann went on, gently. "He come over here the other night after he left your house. He hitched his horse at the gate and come in and sat down. I saw something serious had happened, and as he was not due here, and was overwhelmed with business in Atlanta, I thought he had met with money trouble. I made up my mind then and there, too, that I'd back him to the extent of every thimbleful of land and every splinter of timber in my possession; but it wasn't money he wanted. It was something else. He sat there in the moonlight that was shining through the door, with his head on his breast plumb full of despair. I finally got it out of him. You'd refused him outright. You'd decided that you could get on without the love and life-devotion of the grandest man that ever lived. I was thoroughly mad at you then. I come in an inch of turning plumb against you, but I didn't. I fought for you as I'd have fought for myself away back in my girlhood. I did it, although I could have spanked you good for making him so miserable."

"You know why I refused him," Virginia said, in a low voice. "You, of all persons, will know that."

"I don't know as I do," Ann said, with a probing expression in her eyes. "I don't know, unless, after all, you have a leaning for that young scamp, who has no more real honor than a convict in his stripes. Women are that way, except in very rare cases. The bigger the scoundrel and the meaner he treats them the more they want him. If it's that, I am not going to upbraid you. Upbraiding folks for obeying the laws of nature is the greatest loss of wind possible. If you really love that scamp, no power under high heaven will turn you."

"Love him? I loathe him!" burst passionately from Virginia's lips.

"Then what under the sun made you treat Luke King as you did?" asked Ann, almost sternly.

"Because I could not marry him," said the girl, firmly. "I'd rather die than accept the love and devotion of a man as noble as he is after—after—oh, you know what I mean!"

"Oh, I see—I see," Ann said, her brows meeting. "There comes another law of nature. I reckon if you feel that way, any argument I'd put up would fall on deaf ears."

"I could never accept his love and confidence without telling him all that took place that night, and I'd kill myself rather than have him know," declared the girl.

"Oh, that's the trouble!" Ann exclaimed. "Well, I hope all that will wear away in time. It's fortunate that you are not loved by a narrow fool, my child. Luke King has seen a lots of the world in his young life."

"He has not seen enough of the world to make him overlook a thing of that kind, and you know it," Virginia sighed. "I really believe the higher a man becomes spiritually the higher his ideal of a woman is. I know what he thinks of me now, but I don't know what he would think if he knew the whole truth. He must never be told that, Mrs. Boyd. God knows I am grateful to you for all you have done, but you must not tell him that."

Ann put down her sheet and went to the fireplace, and with the tip of her coarse, gaping shoe she pushed some burning embers under a three-legged pot on the stone hearth. With her tongs she lifted the iron lid and looked at a corn-pone browning within, and then she replaced it. Her brow was deeply wrinkled.

"You told me everything that happened that night, if I remember right," she said, tentatively. "In fact, I know you did."

Virginia said nothing; her thoughts seemed elsewhere.

Leaning the tongs against the fireplace, Ann came forward and bent over her almost excitedly.

"Look here, child," she said, "you told me that—that I got there in time. You told me—"

"I told you all I thought was necessary for you to understand the situation," said Virginia, her eyes downcast, "but I didn't tell you all I'd have to tell Luke King—to be his wife."

"You say you didn't." Ann sat down heavily in her chair. "Then be plain with me; what under the sun did you leave out?"

"I left out the fact that I was crazy that night," said Virginia. "I read in a book once that a woman is so constituted that she can't see reason in anything which does not coincide with her desires. I saw only one thing that night that was worth considering. I saw only the awful suffering of my mother and the chance to put an end to it by getting hold of that man's money. Do you understand now? I went there for that purpose. I'd have laid down my life for it. When those men came he urged me to run and hide in his room, as he and I stood on the veranda, and it was not fear of exposure that drove me up the stairs holding to his hand. It was the almost appalling fear that the promised money would slip through my fingers if I didn't obey him to the letter. And when he whispered, with his hot breath in my ear, there in his room, as his friends were loudly knocking at the door below, that he would rid himself of them and come back, and asked me if I'd wait, I said yes, as I would, have said it to God in heaven. Then he asked me if it was 'a promise,' and I said yes again. Then he asked me, Mrs. Boyd, he asked me—"

Virginia's voice died out. She fell to quivering from head to foot.

"Well, well, go on!" Ann said, under her breath. "Go on. What did he ask you?"

Virginia hesitated for another minute, then, with her face red with shame, she said: "He asked me to prove it by—kissing him—kissing him of my own free will. I hesitated, I think. Yes, I hesitated, but I heard the steps of the men in the hall below at the foot of the stairs. I thought of the money, Mrs. Boyd, and I kissed him."

"You did?"

"Yes. I did—there, in his room!"

"Well, I'm glad you told me that," Ann breathed, deeply. "I think I understand it better now. I understand how you feel."

"So you see, all that's what I'd have to tell Luke King," Virginia said; "and I'll never do it—never on this earth. I want him always to think of me as he does right now."

Ann locked her big hands in her lap and bent forward.

"I see my greatest trouble is going to lie with you," she said. "You are conscientious. Millions of women have kept worse things than that from their husbands and never lost a wink of sleep over them, but you seem to be of a different stripe. I think Luke King is too grand a man to hold that against you, under all the circumstances. I think so, but I don't know men any better than they know women, and I'm not going to urge you one way or the other. I thought my easy-going husband would do me justice, but he couldn't have done it to save his neck from the loop. In my opinion there never will be any happy unions between men and women till men quit thinking so much about the weakness of women's bodies and so little of the strength of their souls. The view you had that night of the dark valley of a living death, and your escape from it, has lifted you into a purity undreamt of by the average woman. If Luke King's able to comprehend that, he may get him a wife on the open mountain-top; if not, he can find her in the bushes at the foot. He'll obey his natural law, as you and I will ours."