"Oh, don’t thank _me_, child!" Had Ann been a close observer of her own idiosyncrasies, her unwary softness of tone and gentleness to a daughter of her sworn enemy would have surprised her. "Don’t thank me," she repeated. "Thank God for letting you escape the lot of others just as young and unsuspecting as you ever were. I don’t deserve credit for what I done last night. In fact, between you and me, I tried my level best not to interfere. Why I finally gave in I don’t know, but I done it, and that’s all there is to it. I done it. I got started and couldn’t stop. But I want to talk to you. Come in the house a minute. It won’t take long. Jane—your mother—will think the cow has strayed off, but there stands the cow in the edge of the swamp. Come on." Dumbly, Virginia followed into the house and sank into a chair, holding her shapely hands in her lap, her wealth of golden-brown hair massed on her head and exquisite neck. Ann shambled in her untied, dew-wet shoes to the fireplace and poured out a cup of coffee from a tin pot on the coals. "Drink this," she said. "If what I hear is true, you don’t get any too much to eat and drink over your way." Virginia took it and sipped it daintily, but with evident relish. "I see you take to that," Ann said, unconscious of the genuine, motherly delight she was betraying. "Here, child, I’ll tell you what I want you to do. These spiced sausages of mine, dry as powder in the corn-shuck, are the best and sweetest flavored that ever you stuck a tooth in. They fry in their own grease almost as soon as they hit a hot pan when they are sliced thin." "Oh no, I thank you," Virginia protested; "I really couldn’t." "But I know you _can_," Ann insisted, as she cut down from a rafter overhead one of the sausages and deftly sliced it in a pan already hot on the coals. "You needn’t tell me you ain’t hungry. I can see it in your face. Besides, do you know it’s a strange fact that a woman will eat just the same in trouble as out, while a man’s appetite is gone the minute he’s worried?" The girl made no further protest, and Ann soon brought some hot slices of the aromatic food, with nicely browned toast, and placed them in a plate in her lap. "How funny all this seems!" Ann ran on. "Here I am feeding you up and feeling sorry for you when only last night I—well, I’ve got to talk to you, and I’m going to get it over with. I’ll have to speak of the part of my life that has been the cud for every idle woman in these mountains to chaw on for many, many years, but I’m going to do it, so you will know better what you escaped last night; but, first of all, I want to ask you a straight question, and I don’t mean no harm nor to be meddling where I have no business. I want to know if you love this Langdon Chester as—well, as you’ve always fancied you’d love the man you became a wife to."