A few minutes later, with her flabby carpet-bag on her sharp hip, Jane fared forth on the mountain road, which led farther eastward. She walked slowly and with increased effort, for the high altitude seemed to affect her respiration, and, light as it was, the carpet-bag became cumbersome and she had to pause frequently to rest.

"Yes, if I'm going to do it, I'll have to plunge in and do it, and be done with the matter," she kept saying. "I reckon it isn't the first time such a thing has been heard of." She passed several humble mountain houses, built of logs, on the way, but stopped at none of them. The sun was near the zenith when she came to a double log-cabin standing back on a plot of newly cleared land a hundred yards from the rocky road. A tall, plain-looking girl, with a hard, unsympathetic face, stood in the doorway, and she stepped down to the ground and quieted a snarling dog which was chained to a stake driven into the earth.

"I reckon you are Nettie Boyd, ain't you?" Jane said.

"I used to be," the young woman answered. "I married a Lawson—Sam Lawson—awhile back."

"Oh yes, I forgot that. I'd heard it, too, of course, but it slipped my memory. I'm a Hemingway, from over in Murray County—Jane Hemingway. I used to be acquainted with your pa. Is he handy?"

"Yes, he was here just a minute ago," Ann Boyd's daughter answered. "He's around at his hay-stack pulling down some roughness for the cow. Go in and take a seat and I'll call him. Lay your bonnet on the bed and make yourself at home."

Jane went into the cabin, the walls of which were unlined, being only the bare logs with the bark on them. The cracks where the logs failed to fit closely together were filled with the red clay from the hills around. There was not a picture in sight, not an ornament on the crude board shelf over the rugged mud-and-stone fireplace. From wooden pegs driven in auger-holes in the walls hung the young bride's meagre finery, in company with what was evidently her husband's best suit of clothes and hat. Beneath them, on the floor, stood a pair of new woman's shoes, dwarfed by contrast to a heavier and larger masculine pair. Jane sat down, rolling her bonnet in her stiff fingers. The chair she sat on was evidently of home make, for the rockers were unevenly sawed, and, on the unplaned boards of the floor, it had a joggling, noisy motion when in use. There were two beds in the room, made of rough, pine planks. The coverings of the beds were not in order and the pillows were soiled.

"If she'd 'a' stayed on with Ann she would 'a' made a better house-keeper than that," Jane mused. "She's a sight, too, with her hair uncombed and dress so untidy so soon after the honeymoon. I can see now that her and Ann never would get on together. Anybody could take one look at that girl and see she's selfish. I wonder what that fellow ever saw in her?"

There was a sound of voices outside. With a start, Jane drew herself erect. The carpet-bag on her knees threatened to fall, and she lowered it to the floor. Her ordeal was before her.

"Why, howdy do?"

Joe Boyd, in tattered shirt, trousers patched upon patches, and gaping shoes through which his bare toes showed, stood in the doorway. That the old beau and the once most popular young man of the country-side could stand looking like that before her, even after the lapse of all those trying years, and not feel abashed, was one of the inexplicable things that rushed through Jane Hemingway's benumbed brain. That she, herself, could be looking at the very husk of the ideal of manhood she had held all those years and not cry out in actual pain over the pitiful evidences of his collapse from his high estate was another thing she marvelled over. Joe Boyd! Could it actually be he? Could those gaunt, talon-nailed members, with their parchment-like skin, be the hands she used to think so shapely? Could those splaying feet be the feet that had tripped more lightly in the Virginia Reel than those of any other man for miles around? Could those furtive, harsh-glancing eyes be the deep, dreamy ones in which she had once seen the mirage of her every girlish hope? Could that rasping tone come from the voice whose never diminishing echo had rung in her ears through all those years of hiding her secret from the man she had married out of "spite," through all her long tooth-in-flesh fight with the rival who had temporarily won and held him?

She rose and gave him her hand, and the two stood facing each other, she speechless, he thoroughly at his indolent ease.

"Well, I reckon, Jane, old girl," he laughed, as he wiped a trickling stream of tobacco-juice from the corner of his sagging mouth, "that you are the very last human being I ever expected to lay eyes on again. I swear I wouldn't 'a' known you from Adam's cat if Nettie hadn't told me who it was. My, how thin you look, and all bent over!"

"Yes, I'm changed, and you are too, Joe," she said, as, with a stiff hand beneath her, she sought the chair again.

"Yes"—he went to the doorway and spat voluminously out into the yard, and came back swinging a chair as lightly in his hand as if it had been a baseball bat with which he was playing—"yes, I reckon I am altered considerable; a body's more apt to see changes in others than in himself. I was just thinking the other day about them old times. La me! how much fun we all did have, but it didn't last—it didn't last."

He sat down, leaning forward and clasping his dry-palmed hands with a sound like the rubbing together of two pieces of paper. There was an awkward silence. Nettie Lawson came to the door and glanced in inquiringly, and then went away. They heard her calling her chickens some distance from the cabin.

"No, I wouldn't have recognized you if I'd met you alone in the big road," he said, "nor you wouldn't me, I reckon."

"Joe"—she was looking about the room—"somehow I had an idea that you were in—in a little better circumstances than—than you seem to be in now."

"Well, that wouldn't be hard to imagine, anyway," he said, with an intonation like a sigh, if it wasn't one. "If a body couldn't imagine a better fix for a man to be in than I am in, they'd better quit. Lord, Lord, I reckon I ought to be dead ashamed to meet you in this condition when you knew me away back in them palmy days, but, Jane, I really believe I've sunk below that sort of a feeling. You know I used to cut a wide swath when I had plenty of money and friends, but what's the use of crying over spilt milk? This is all there is left of me. I managed to marry Nettie off to a feller good enough in his way. I thought he was a fine catch, but I don't know. I was under the impression that his folks had some money to give him to sorter start the two out, but it seems they didn't have, and was looking for a stake themselves. Since they married he just stays round here, contented and about as shiftless as anybody could be. I thought, for instance, that he never got in debt, but a store-keeper in town told me the other day that he owed him for the very duds he was married in."

"That's bad, that's powerful bad," Jane said, sympathetically. Then a fixed look took possession of her eyes, and her fingers tightened on her bonnet in her lap, as she plunged towards the thing with which she was burdened. "Joe," she continued, "I've come all the way over the mountain in my delicate health to see you about a particular matter. God knows it's the hardest thing I ever contemplated, but there is no other way out of it."

"Well, I think I know what you are going to say," he answered, avoiding her eyes.

"You do, Joe?" she exclaimed. "Oh no, surely, you can't know that."

"Well, I think I can make a good guess," he said, awkwardly twirling his fingers round and round. "You see, I always make a habit, when I happen to meet anybody from over your way, of asking about old acquaintances, and I heard some time back that you was in deep trouble. They said you had some high-priced doctoring to do in Atlanta, and that you was going from old friend to old friend for what little help they could give. I'm going to see what I can do towards it myself, since you've taken such a long trip, though, Jane, to tell you the truth, I haven't actually seen a ten-cent piece in a month. I've gone without tobacco when I thought the desire for it would run me distracted. So—"

"I didn't come for help—Lord, Lord, I only wish it was that, Joe. I've already had the operation, and I'm recovering. I've come over here, Joe, to make an awful confession."

"A—a—what?" he said.

There was a pause. Jane Hemingway unrolled her bonnet and put it on, pulling the hood down over her line of vision.

"Joe, I've come to tell you that I've been a bad woman; I've been a bad, sinning woman since away back there when you married Ann. Things you used to say to me, I reckon, turned my silly head. You remember when you took me to camp-meeting that night, and we sat through meeting out in the buggy under the trees. I reckon, if it was all to do over you wouldn't have said so much. I reckon you wouldn't if you'd known you were planting a seed that was going to fructify and bear the fruit of hate and enmity that would never rot; but, for all I know, you may have been saying the same things to other girls who knew better how to take them than I did."

"Oh, Jane, I was a fool them days," Joe Boyd broke in, with an actual flush of shame in his tanned face.

"Well, never mind about that," Jane went on, with a fresher determination under his own admission. "I reckon I let it take too strong a hold on me. I never could give up easy, and when you got to going with Ann, and she was so much prettier and more sprightly than me, it worked against my nature. It hardened me, I reckon. I married soon after you did, but I won't tell about that; he's dead and gone. I had my child—that was all, except—except my hate for Ann. I couldn't stand to see you and her so happy together, and you both were making money and I was losing what I had. Then, Joe, we all heard about—we all learned Ann's secret."

"Don't—for the love of mercy—don't fetch that up!" Boyd groaned.

"But I have to, Joe," Jane persisted, softly. "At first I was the happiest woman that the devil ever delighted by flashing a lying promise with his fire on a wall. I thought you were going to scorn her, but I saw that day I met you at the meeting-house that you were inclined to condone the past, and that drove me wild; so I—" Jane choked up and paused.

"I remember that day," Joe Boyd said, with a deep breath. "I'll never forget it as long as I live, for what you said dropped me back into the bottomless pit of despair. I'd been trying to think she'd been straight with me since we married, but when you—"

"What I told you that morning, Joe, was a cold, deliberate lie!"

"A—a—" he stammered. "No, no, you don't mean that—you can't mean—"

"Every—single—thing—I—told—you—that—day—was—a—lie!" Jane said, with an emphatic pause between each word.

"I can't understand. I don't see—really, Jane, you can't mean that what you said about Chester's going there day after day when my back was turned, and that you saw them together in the woods below your house that day when I was—"

"Everything I told you was a lie from the devil, out of the very fumes of hell," Jane said, pulling off her bonnet and looking him squarely in the face. "A lie—a lie, Joe."

"Oh, my God!" Boyd cried. "And I, all these years I have—"

"You've been believing what I said. But I'm not through yet. I've been in a dark room fasting and praying for a month to overcome my evil inclination not to speak the truth, and I finally conquered, so I'm going to tell the whole thing. Joe, Ann Boyd is the best woman God ever let live. She was as true as steel to you from the day she married till now. I have been after her day and night, never giving her a moment's rest from my persecutions, and how do you reckon she retaliated? She paid me back by actually saving my worthless life and trying to keep me from knowing who did it. She did something else. She did me the greatest favor one woman could possibly do another. I don't intend to say what that particular thing was, but she must have the credit. Now I'm through. I'm going back home."

Boyd drew his ill-clad feet towards him. He spread out his two arms wide and held them so, steadily. "Look at me—just look at me," he said. "Woman, before you go back, take one good look at me. You come to me—a mere frazil of what I once was—when there is no hope of ever regaining my youth and self-respect—and tell me—oh, my God!—tell me that I believed you instead of her! She said, with tears in her eyes, on her knees before me, that that first mistake was all, and I told her she lied in her throat, and left her, dragging from her clinging arms the child of her breast, bringing it up and raising it to what you see she is. And now you come literally peeping into my open coffin and telling this to my dead face. Great God, woman, before Heaven I feel like striking you where you set, soaked in repentance though you are. All these misspent years I've been your cowardly tool, and her—her—"

"I deserve it—talk on!" Jane Hemingway said, as she rose and clutched her carpet-bag and held it tremblingly.

But Joe Boyd's innate gentleness had been one of the qualities many women loved, and even before the cowering creature who had wrecked his life he melted in manly pity.

"No," he said, stretching out his hand with something like one of his old gestures—"no, I'm going too far, Jane. We are all obedient to natural laws, as Ann used to say. Your laws have made you do just as you have, and so have mine. Away back there in the joy-time of youth my laws made me say too much to you. As you say, I planted the seed. I did; I planted the seed that bore all the fruit; I planted it when I kissed you, Jane, and said them things to you that night which I forgot the next day. Ann could have made something out of me better than this. As long as I had her to manage me, I did well. You see what I am now."

"Yes, I see; and I'm as sorry as I know how to be." Jane sighed as she passed out into the open sunlight. "I'm going home, Joe. I may never lay eyes on you again in this life. If you can say anything to make me feel better, I'd be thankful."

"There isn't anything, except what I said just now about our natural laws, Jane," he said, as he stood shading his eyes from the glare of the sun. "Sometimes I think that nobody hain't to blame for nothing they do, and that all of this temporary muddle is just the different ways human beings have of struggling on to a better world beyond this."

"I thought maybe you might, in so many words, say plain out that you'd forgive me, Joe." She had turned her face towards the road she was to travel, and her once harsh lip was quivering like that of a weeping child.

"The natural law would come in there, too," Boyd sighed. "Forgiveness, of the right sort, don't spring to the heart in such a case as this like a flash of powder in the pan. If I'm to forgive, I will in due time, I reckon; but right now, Jane, I feel too weak and tired, even for that—too weak and heartsick and undone."

"Well, I'm going to pray for it, Joe," she said, as she started away. "Good-bye. May the Lord above bless you."

"Good-bye, Jane; do the best you can," he said, "and I'll try to do the same."