"Yes, a mistake that I was not scalped, or that a merciful bolt of lightning did not strike me dead that day--that cursed day--when first I set my eyes on your false, treacherous face! If you could only know how I hate, despise, utterly despise the bare thought, much more the horrible sight of you!" "No wonder, since circumstances were apparently all against me at----" "Circumstances are no shelter for honest, honorable men, if there be any left; and the hard, bitter, murderous facts of your shameful life would find you out if you dodged under the very throne of the God you blaspheme by professing!" "Will you listen to the truth?" "You could not speak it if you tried. I listened to you once too often, and you wrecked me, and I am no longer a fool." "Why did you leave Thompsonville after you received my letters, and the money I sent you, and when you knew I was coming there to take you away with me?" For an instant she looked at him with startled curiosity, then laughed hysterically. "I left Thompsonville because you wrote no letters, sent no money, and took no notice of my frantic appeals for help in my hour of horrible trial. A sick woman with a frail, feeble baby, facing starvation, abandoned, slandered, and trampled in the mud, I could only snatch at the hand held out to me by the one man I have found honest, honorable, loyal, and true, as he was pitying and kind." "But when I reached Thompsonville Delia Brown told me----" Her scornful laugh drowned his words. "'When you reached Thompsonville' in your dreams--after a night's carousal at college! Even a congenital idiot would sicken at that." No shadow of impatience crossed his happy countenance; the intensity of her scoffing bitterness was part of his punishment--the harvest that sprang from his own sowing--and he must not complain until she understood fully. "I can prove that I went to Thompsonville, and I have the sworn testimony of Delia Brown that she delivered into your hands my letters and the package of money I sent to her care through the express agent. On a scrap of paper I have also a receipt in pencil from you to Delia Brown." She shook her head and smote her palms together. "Forgeries one and all. I would not believe you on your oath, unless the grave yawned, and Leighton Dane--dead six years--came back as witness in your favor." "'He was the handsome Spanish-looking man' Delia Brown told me stole my wife and child and disappeared suddenly--going to Florida or Cuba to grow bananas--when you heard I was coming to Thompsonville?"