The following Sunday afternoon Mrs. Waycroft hastened over to Ann Boyd's. She walked very rapidly across the fields and through the woods rather than by the longer main road. She found Ann in her best dress seated in her dining-room reading Luke King's paper, which had come the day before. She looked up and smiled and nodded to the visitor.

"I just wish you'd listen to this," she said, enthusiastically. "And when you've heard it, if you don't think that boy is a genius you'll miss it by a big jump. On my word, such editorials as this will do more good than all the preaching in Christendom. I've read it four times. Sit down and listen."

"No, you've got to listen to me," said the visitor. "That can wait; it's down in black and white, while mine is fairly busting me wide open. Ann, do you know what took place at meeting this morning?"

"Why, no, how could I? You know I said I'd never darken that door again, after that low-lived coward—"

"Stop, Ann, and listen!" Mrs. Waycroft panted, as she sank into a chair and leaned forward. "You know I go seldom myself, but by some chance I went this morning. I always feel like doing the best I can towards the end of a year. Well, I had hardly got my seat and Brother Bazemore had just got up to make some announcements, when who should come in but Jane Hemingway. Instead of stopping at her usual place, nigh the stove, she walked clean up to the altar-railing and stood as stiff as a post, gazing at the preacher. He was busy with his notes and didn't see her at first, though every eye in the house was fixed on her in wonder, for she was as white as a sheet, and so thin and weak that it looked like the lightest wind would blow her away. 'Brother Bazemore,' she said, loud enough to be heard, in her shrill voice, clean out to the horse-rack, 'I want to say something, and I want to say it out before all of you.'"

"Huh!" Ann grunted—"huh!"

"Well, he looked good surprised," Mrs. Waycroft went on, "but you know he's kind o' resentful if folks don't show consideration for his convenience, so he looked down at her over his specks and said:

"'Well, sister, I reckon the best time for that will be after preaching, and then them that want to stay can do so and feel that they got what they waited for.'

"'But I can't wait,' said she. 'What I've got to say must be said now, while I'm plumb in the notion. If I waited I might back out, and I don't want to do it.'

"Well, he give in; and, Ann, she turned around facing us all and took off her bonnet and swung it about like a flag. She was as nigh dead in looks as any corpse I ever saw. And since you was born, Ann, you never heard the like. Folks was so interested that they stared as if their eyes was popping out of their sockets. She said she'd come to confess to crime—that's the way she put it—crime! She said she'd been passing for half a lifetime in this community as a Christian woman, when in actuality she had been linked body and soul to the devil. Right there she gulped and stood with her old head down; then she looked at us like a crazy person and went on. She said away back when she was a girl she'd been jealous of a certain girl, and that she'd hounded that girl through a long life. She had made it her particular business to stir up strife against that woman by toting lies from one person to another. She turned sort o' sideways to the preacher and said: 'Brother Bazemore, what I told you Ann Boyd said about you that time was all made up—a lie out of whole cloth. I told you that to make you denounce her in public, and you did. I kept telling her neighbors things to make 'em hate her, and they did. I told her husband a whole string of deliberate lies that made him leave her and take her child away. I spent half my life at this thing, to have it end like this: Men and women, the woman that I was doing all that against was the one who came up with the money that saved my worthless life and tried to hide it from me and the rest of the world. She not only done that, but she done me even a greater favor. I won't say what that was, but nobody but an angel from heaven, robed in the flesh of earth, could have done that, for it was the very thing she had every right to want to see visited on me. That act would have paid me back in my own coin, and she wanted to count out the money, but she was too much of heaven to go through it. Instead of striking at me, she saved me suffering that would have dragged me to the dust in shame. I've come here to say all this because I want to do her justice, if I can, while the breath of life is in me. I've just got back from Gilmer, where I went and met the man whose life I wrecked—her husband. I told him the truth, hoping that I could do him some good in atonement, but the poor, worn-out man seemed too utterly crushed to forgive me.'"

"Joe—she went to Joe!" Ann gasped, finding her voice. "Now, I reckon, he believes me. And to think that Jane Hemingway would say all that—do all that! It don't seem reasonable. But you say she actually—"

"Of course she did," broke in the narrator. "And when she was through she marched straight down the middle aisle and stalked outside. Half the folks got up and went to the windows and watched her tottering along the road; and then Brother Bazemore called 'em back and made 'em sit down. He said, in his cold-blooded way, hemming and hawing, that the whole community had been too severe, and that the best way to get the thing settled and smooth-running again was to agree on some sort of public testimonial. Ann, I reckon fully ten men yelled out that they would second the motion. I never in all my life saw such excitement. Folks was actually crying, and this one and that one was telling kind things you had done to them. Then they all got around me, Ann, and they made a lots over me, saying I was the only one who had acted right, and that I must ask you to forgive them. That was the motion Bazemore put and carried by a vote of rising. Half of them was so anxious to have their votes counted that they climbed up on the benches and waved their hats and bonnets and shawls, and yelled out, 'Here! here!' Bazemore dismissed without preaching; it looked like he thought nothing he could say, in any regular line, would count in such a tumult. And after meeting dozens of 'em slid up to me and snatched my hands and told me to speak a good word for them; they kept it up even after I'd got outside, some of 'em walking part of the way with me and sending messages. Wait till I catch my breath, and I'll tell you who spoke and what each one said, as well as I can."

"Never mind," said Ann, an absent look in her strong face. "I believe I'd rather not hear any more of it; it don't make one bit of difference one way or another."

"Why, Ann, surely you won't entertain hard feelings, now that they all feel so bad. If you could only 'a' been there, you would—"

"Oh, it isn't that," Ann sighed, and with her closed hand she pounded her heavy knee restlessly. "You see, Mary—oh, I don't know—but, well, I can't possibly be any way but the way the Lord made me, and to save my life I can't feel grateful. They all just seem to me like a lot of spoilt children that laugh or cry over whatever comes up. Somehow a testimonial from a congregation like that, after a lifetime of beating me and covering me with slime, seems more like an insult than a compliment. They think they can besmirch the best part of my life, and then rub it off in a minute with good intentions and a few words. Why, it was the same sort of whim that made them all follow Jane Hemingway like sheep after a leader. I don't hate 'em, you understand, but what they do or say simply don't alter my feelings a speck. I have known all along that I had the right kind of—character, and to listen to their sniffling testimony on the subject would seem to me like—well, like insulting my own womanhood."

"You are a powerful strange creature, Ann," Mrs. Waycroft said, reflectively, "but, I reckon, if you hadn't been that way you wouldn't be such a wonderful woman in so many ways. I was holding something back for the last, but I reckon you'll sniff at that more than what I've already told you. Ann, when I got home, and had just set down to eat a snack before running over to you, who should come to my back gate and call me out except Jane herself. She stood leaning against the fence like the walk had nearly done her up, and she refused to come in and set down. She said she wanted me to do her a favor. She said she knew I was at meeting and heard what she said, but that she wanted me to come to you for her. As God is my final Judge, I never felt such pity for a poor rotten shred of humanity in all my life. She looked like she was trying to cry, but was too dry inside to do anything but wheeze; her very eyes seemed to be literally on fire; she looked like a crazy person talking rationally. She said she wanted me to tell you how sorry and broke up she was, that she'd pay back that hundred dollars if she had to deed away her dead body to some medical college. She said she could do anything on earth to make amends except go to you face to face and apologize—she'd walk from door to door all over the country, she said, and tell her tale of shame, but she couldn't say it to you. She said she had tried for weeks to do it, but she knew she'd never have the moral strength."

"She talked that way?" Ann said, looking steadily out into the sunshine through the open doorway.

"Yes; and I reckon you have as little patience with her message as you have with the balance," said the visitor.

"No, she's different, Mary," Ann declared. "Jane Hemingway is another proposition altogether. She's fought a long, fierce fight, and God Almighty's forces have whipped her clean out. She was a worthy foe, and I respect her more now than I ever did. She was different from the rest. She had a cause. She had something to fight about. She loved Joe Boyd with all the heart she ever had, and when I married him she couldn't—simply couldn't—let it rest. She held on like a bull-dog with his teeth clamped to bone. She's beat; I won't wait for her to come to me; I may take a notion and go to her."