"I’m a very odd woman, child, and I want to tell you what I regard as the oddest thing about me. You say you feel kind towards me, and, and—love me a little. Well, ever since that night in that young scamp’s room, when I came on you, crouched down there in your misery and fear, looking so much like I must ’a’ looked at one time away back when not a spark of hope flashed in my black sky—ever since I saw you that way, helpless as a fresh violet in the track of a grazing bull, I have felt a yearning to draw you up against this old storm-beaten breast of mine and rock you to sleep. That’s odd, but that isn’t the odd thing I was driving at, and it is this, Virginia—I don’t care a snap of my finger about my _own_ child. Think of that. If I was to hear of her death to-night it wouldn’t be any more to me than the news of the death of any stranger." "That _is_ queer," said Virginia, thoughtfully. "Well, it’s only nature working, I reckon," Ann said. "I loved her as a baby—in a natural way, I suppose—but when she went off from me, and by her going helped—child though she was—to stamp the brand on me that has been like the mark of a convict on my brow ever since—when she went off, I say, I hardened my heart towards her, and day after day I kept it hard till now she couldn’t soften it. Maybe if I was to see her in trouble like you were in, my heart would go out to her; but she’s independent of me; the only thing I’ve ever heard of her is that she cries and shudders at the mention of my name. She shudders at it, and she’ll go down to her grave shuddering at it. She’ll teach her children not to mention me. No, I’ll never love her, and that’s why it seems odd for me to feel like I do about you. Heaven knows, it seems like a dream when I remember that you are Jane Hemingway’s child and the chief pride of her hard life. As for my own girl, she’s full grown now, and has her natural plans and aspirations, and is afraid my record will blight them. I don’t even know how she looks, but I have in mind a tall, stiff-necked, bony girl inclined to awkwardness, selfish, grasping, and unusually proud. But I can love as well as hate, though I’ve done more hating in my life than loving. There was a time I thought the very seeds of love had dried up in me, but about that time I picked up Luke King. Even as a boy he seemed to look deep into the problems of life, and was sorry for me. Somehow me and him got to talking over my trouble as if he’d been a woman, and he always stood to me and pitied me and called me tender names. You see, nobody at his home understood him, and he had his troubles, too, so we naturally drifted together like a mother and son pulled towards one another by the oddest freak of circumstances that ever came in two lives. We used to sit here in this room and talk of the deepest questions that ever puzzled the human brain. Our reason told us the infinite plan of the universe must be good, but we couldn’t make it