In about half an hour Virginia returned home. She passed Sam under the apple-tree, where he now had a big pot full of shelled corn and lye over an incipient fire preparing to make whole-grained hominy, and hastened into the kitchen, where Jane sat bowed before the fire.

"Is there anything I can do, mother?" she inquired.

There was a pause. Mrs. Hemingway did not look up. In some surprise, Virginia repeated her question, and then Jane said, calmly and deliberately:

"Yes; there is something you can do. You can get out of my sight, and keep out of it. When I want anything from you, I'll call on you."

Virginia paused, dumfounded, and then passed out into the yard and approached her uncle.

"Can you tell me," she asked, "if anything has gone wrong with mother?"

Sam gave her one swift glance from beneath his tattered, tent-shaped wool-hat, and then, with his paddle, he began to stir the corn and lye in the pot.

"I reckon," he said, after a momentary struggle over a desire to tell the plain truth instead of prevaricating, "if you don't know that woman by this time, Virgie, it's your own fault. I'm sure I don't try to keep up with her tantrums and sudden notions. That woman's died forty-seven times in her life, and been laid out and buried ten. Maybe she's been tasting them pies she was cooking, and got crooked. You let a body's liver be at all sluggish and get a wad o' sweet-potato dough lodged inside of 'em, and they'll have a sort of jim-jams not brought on by liquor. I reckon she'll cough it down after a while. If I was you, though, I'd let her alone."

Jane was, indeed, acting strangely. Refusing to sit down to the mid-day meal with them, as was her invariable custom, she put on her bonnet and shawl and, without a word of explanation, set off in the direction of Wilson's store. She was gone till dusk, and then came in with a slow step, passed through the sitting-room, where Sam had made a cheerful fire, and went on to her own room in the rear of the house. Virginia rose to follow her solicitously, but Sam put out a detaining hand, shifting his pipe into the corner of his mouth.

"I'd let her alone if I was in your place," he said. "Let her go to bed and sleep. She'll get up all right in the morning."

"I only wanted to see if there was anything I could do for her," Virginia said, in a troubled tone. "Do you suppose it is a relapse she is having? Perhaps she has discovered that the cancer is coming back. The fear of that would kill her, actually kill her."

"I don't think that's it," said Sam, impulsively; "the truth is, Virginia, she—" He pulled himself up. "But maybe that is it. Anyway, I'd let her alone."

Darkness came down. Virginia spread the cloth in the big kitchen and put the plates and dishes in their places, and then slipped to the door of her mother's room. It was dark and still.

"Supper is on the table, mother," she said; "do you want anything?"

There was a sudden creaking of the bed-slats, a pause, then, in a sullen, husky voice, Jane answered, "No, I don't; you leave me alone!"

"All right, mother; I'm sorry to have disturbed you. Good-night."

Sam and his niece ate alone in the big room by the wavering light of the fire. The wind had risen on the mountain-top, and roared across the fields. It sang dolefully in the pines near by, whistled shrilly under the eaves of the house, and scurried through the open passage outside. After the meal was over, Sam smoked a pipe and thumped off to bed, carrying his shoes in his hand. Virginia buried the remains of the big back-log in the hot ashes, and in the darkness crept into her own room, adjoining that of her mother, and went to bed.

Jane Hemingway was not sleeping; she had no hope of a respite of that sort. She would have doubted that she ever could close her eyes in tranquillity till some settlement of the life-crushing matter was reached. What was to be done? Only one expedient had offered itself during her aimless walk to the store, where she purchased a spool of cotton thread she did not need, and during her slow return along the road and the further hours of solitude in her darkened chamber, and that expedient offered no balm for her gashed and torn pride. She could appeal to the law to protect her innocent daughter from the designing wiles of a woman of such a reputation as Ann Boyd bore, but, alas! even Ann might have foreseen that ruse and counted on its more deeply stirring Virginia's sympathies and adding to her faith. Why she had not at once denounced her child for her filial faithlessness she could not have explained, unless it was the superstitious dread of having Virginia's infidelity reconfirmed. Of course, she must fight. Yes, she'd have to do that to the end, although her shrewd enemy had already beaten her life-pulse dead in her veins and left her without a hope of adequate retaliation. Going to law meant also that it was her first public acknowledgment of her enemy's prowess, and it meant, too, the wide-spread and humiliating advertisement of the fact that Virginia had died to her and been born to the breast of her rival; but even that must be borne.

These morose reflections were broken, near midnight, by a step in the passage outside. The door was opened softly, and Virginia, in her night-robe, came in quietly and approached the bed.

"I know you are not asleep, mother," she said, tremulously. "I've heard you rolling and tossing ever since I went to bed."

Jane stared from her hot pillow for an instant, and then slowly propped herself up on her gaunt, quivering elbow. "You are not asleep either, it seems," she said, hollowly.

"No, I couldn't for thinking about you," Virginia replied, gently, as she sat down on the foot of the bed.

"You couldn't, huh! I say!" Jane sneered. "Huh, you! It's a pity about you!"

"I have reason to worry," Virginia said. "You know the doctors told you particularly not to get depressed and downhearted while you are recovering your strength."

"Huh! what do they mean by prescribing things that can't be reached under the sun? They are idiots to think I could have peace of mind after finding out what I did this morning. I once had a cancer in the flesh; I've got one now in my heart, where no knife on earth can reach it."

There was a pause. The eyes of the mother and daughter met in the half-darkness of the room. There was a lull in the whistling of the wind outside. Under the floor a hen with a brood of chickens was clucking uneasily and flapping her wings in the effort to keep her brood warm. Across the passage came the rasping sound of Sam's snoring, as unconscious of tragedy as he had been in his cradle, and yet its creeping shadow lay over his placid features, its bated breath filled the air he was breathing. Virginia leaned forward wonderingly, her lips parted and set in anxiety.

"You are thinking about the debt on the farm?" she ventured. "If that's it, mother, remember—"

"The debt on this paltry shack and few acres of rocky land? Huh! if that was all I had to complain about I'd bounce out of this bed and shout for joy. Oh, Lord, have mercy on me!"

"Then, mother, what—" Virginia drew herself up with a start. Her mother, it now struck her, had said her trouble was due to a discovery she had made that morning. What else could it be than that her mother had accidentally seen her in company with Ann Boyd? Yes, that was it, and Virginia hastily told herself that some satisfying explanation must be made, some plausible and pacifying reason must be forthcoming that would allay her mother's anger, but it was hard to lie, in open words, as she had been doing in act. The gentle girl shuddered before the impending ordeal and clinched her hands in her lap. Yes, it was hard to lie, and yet the truth—the whole truth—was impossible.

"Mother," she began, "you see—I suppose I'll have to confess to you that Mrs. Boyd and I—"

"Don't blacken your soul with lies!" her mother hurled at her, furiously. "I slipped up in a few feet of you both at the spring and saw you kissing her, and heard you tell her you loved her more than anybody in the world, and that she'd treated you better than I ever did, and that she was the best woman that ever lived. Explain all that, if you can, but don't set there and lie to me who gave you what life you've got, and toiled and stinted and worked my hands to the bone to raise, you and let you hold your own with others. If there's a speck of truth in you, don't deny what I saw with my own eyes and heard with my two ears."

"I'll not deny it, then," Virginia said. She rose and moved to the small-paned window and stood with her face turned away. "I have met Mrs. Boyd several times and talked to her. I don't think she has ever had justice done her by you and her neighbors; she is not rightly understood, and, feeling that you have been all along the chief influence against her, and have always kept her early trouble stirred up, I felt like being her friend as well as I could, and at the same time remain true to you."

"Oh, you poor, poor little sniffling idiot!" Jane said, as she drew her thin legs out from the coverings and rested her feet on the floor and leaned forward. "All this time you've been thinking, in your grand way, that you were doing a kindness to her, when she was just using you as a tool, to devil me. Huh! didn't she throw it up to me once at the wash-place where she and I met? She told me to my teeth that something was coming that would bring my face to the earth in shame. I thought she knew about the cancer, and was gloating over it; but she wasn't speaking of that, for when I came back from Atlanta, sound and whole, she hurled her hints at me again. She said she knew nothing about the cancer at that time, but that she still knew something that would make me slink from the faces of men and women like a whipped hound. I discovered what she meant to-day. She meant that because my testimony had something to do with Joe Boyd's leaving with her child, she had won over mine to herself. That's been her mean and sneaking plot all this time, in which she has been decoying you from a respectable roof and making you her easy tool—the tool with which she expected to stab at my pride and humble me in the eyes of everybody."

"Mother, stop!" Virginia turned and sat down again on the bed. "That woman shall not have another—not one other—false charge piled up around her. God knows I don't see how I can tell you all the truth, but it is due to her now. It will more than justify her, and that's my duty. Listen, and don't interrupt me. I want to go straight through this, and when I have finished you may turn from me and force me to go to her for a home. You have never dreamed that I could do what I am about to confess I did. I am not going to excuse myself, either. What I did, I did. The shame of it, now that I see clearly, is killing me. No, stop! Let me go on. I have been receiving the attentions of Langdon Chester in secret. After the first time you saw us together and objected so strongly, I told him not to come to the house again; but, like many another silly girl, I was hungry for admiration, and met him elsewhere. I loved to hear the nice things he said, although I didn't always believe them. He—he tried to induce me to do a number of imprudent things, which, somehow, I was able to refuse, as they concerned my own pleasure alone; but then you began to worry about the money to go to Atlanta on. Day by day you grew more and more despondent and desperate as every effort failed, and one day, when you were down at the lowest ebb of hope, he told me that he—do you understand, mother?—Langdon Chester told me that he thought he could get up the money, but that no one must know that he—"

"Oh, my God, don't, don't, don't!" Jane groaned. "Don't tell me that you—"

"Stop! let me go on," Virginia said, in a low, desperate tone. "I'm going to tell the whole horrible thing and be done with it forever. He said he had sent his best horse to Darley to sell it, and that the man would be back about ten o'clock at night with the money. He told me, mother, that he wanted me to slip away from home after you went to sleep and come there for the money. I didn't hesitate long. I wanted to save your life. I agreed. I might have failed to go after I parted with him if I'd had time to reflect, but when I came in to supper you were more desperate than ever. You went to your room praying and moaning, and kept it up till you dropped asleep only a few minutes before the appointed time. Well, I slipped away and—went."

"Oh, God have mercy on me—mercy, mercy, mercy!" Jane groaned. "You went there to that man!"

Virginia nodded mutely and then continued her recital. Jane Hemingway's knees bent under her as she stood holding to the bedpost, and she slowly sank to the floor a few feet away. With a low, moaning sound like a suffering dumb brute, she crawled on her hands and knees to her daughter and mutely clutched the girl's cold, bare ankles. "You say he locked you in his bedroom!" she said, in a rasping whisper. "Locked you—actually locked you in! Oh, Lord have mercy!"

"Then, after a long wait," the girl went on, "in which I was praying only for the money, mother—the money to save your life and put you out of agony—I heard steps, first on the stairs and then at the door. Somebody touched the latch. The door held fast. Then the key was turned, and as I sat there with covered face, now with the dread of death upon me for the first time, somebody came in and stood over me."

"The scoundrel! The beast!" Jane's hands slipped from their hold on the girl's ankles and fell; her head and shoulders sank till her brow touched the floor.

"A hand was laid on my head," Virginia went on. "I heard a voice—"

"The fiend from hell!" Jane raised her haggard face and glaring eyes. "Don't, don't tell me that he dared to—"

"It was Mrs. Boyd, mother—Ann Boyd," said Virginia.

"Ann Boyd!" Jane groaned. "I see it now; she was at the bottom of it; it was all her doing. That was her plot. Ah, God, I see it now!"

"You are mistaken," the girl said. "She had accidentally overheard my agreement to go there, and came for no other reason than to save me, mother—to save me."

"To save you?" Jane raised herself on her two hands like a four-footed animal looking up from its food. "Save your" she repeated, with the helpless glare of insanity in her blearing eyes.

"Yes, to save me. She was acting on impulse, an impulse for good that she was even then fighting against. When she heard of that appointment she actually gloated over it, but, mother, she found herself unequal to it. As the time which had been set drew near, she plunged out into the night and got there only a few minutes before—"

"In time—oh, my God, did you say in time?" Jane gasped, again clutching her daughter's ankles and holding desperately to them.

"Yes, in time to save me from all but the life-long consciousness of my awful indiscretion. She brought me away, and after that how could I be other than a grateful friend to such a noble creature?"

"In time—oh, my God, in time!" Jane exclaimed, as she sat erect on the floor and tossed her scant hair, which, like a wisp of tow, hung down her cheek. Then she got up stiffly and moved back to the bed as aimlessly as if she were wandering in her sleep.

"There is no use in my saying more, mother." Virginia rose and turned to the door. "I'm going back to my room. You can think it all over and do as you please with me. I deserve punishment, and I'm willing to take it."

Jane stared at her from her hollow eyes for a moment, then she said: "Yes, go! I never want to see you again; Ann Boyd saved you, but she is now gloating over me. She'll call it heaping coals of fire on my head; she'll brag to me and others of what she's done, and of what I owe her. Oh, I know that woman! You've escaped one thing, but have made me face another worse than death. Go on away—get clear out of my sight. If you don't I'll say something to you that you will remember all your life."

"Very well, mother." Virginia moved to the door. Her hand was on the latch, when, with a startled gasp, her mother called out:

"Stop!—stop! For God's sake don't you dare to tell me that I went to Atlanta and bought back my life with that young scoundrel's money; if you do, as God is my Judge, I'll strike you dead where you stand."

"No, I refused to take it," Virginia said. "He came to me afterwards and begged me to accept it, but I refused."

"Then how under the sun—" Jane began, but went no further.

Virginia turned in the doorway and stood still; a look of resigned despair was on her. "You may as well know all the truth," she said. "I promised not to tell, but you really ought to know this, too. Mother, Ann Boyd, gave me the money. The woman you are still hounding and hating earned the money by the sweat of her brow that saved your life."

"Ann Boyd! Oh, my God, and to think you can stand there and tell me that! Get out of my sight. You have acted the fool all along, and humiliated me in the dust by your conduct. You are no child of mine. It was all a plot—a dirty, low plot. She has used you. She has used me. She is laughing at us both right now. Oh, I know her! Get out of my sight or I'll forget myself and—go, I tell you!"