As if in a horrible dream, Jane Hemingway turned back homeward. Without knowing why, she still moved with the same breathless caution. Hers was a dead soul dragging a body vitalized only by sheer animal instinct to escape torture. To escape it? No, it was there ahead—it was here, encompassing her like a net, yonder, behind, everywhere, and it would stretch out to the end of time. She told her benumbed consciousness that she saw it all now. It was not the cancer and its deadly effect that Ann had held over her that hot day at the wash-place. No wonder that Ann had not told her all, for that would have marred her comprehensive and relentless plans. Ann’s subtle plot had been to rob her enemy of the respect and love of her only child. Jane had succeeded in tearing from Ann Boyd’s arms her only offspring, and Ann, with the cunning of her great, indefatigable brain, had devised this subtle revenge and carried it through. She had won over to herself the love and respect, even reverence, of her enemy’s child. It had been going on in secret for a long time, and even now the truth was out only by sheer accident. Jane Hemingway groaned aloud in agony and self-pity as, with her gray head down, she groped homeward. What was there to do now? Nothing! She was learning her final grim lesson in the realization that she was no possible match for her rival. How well she now recalled the fierce words Ann had hurled at her only a few days since: "Could I hit back at you now? Could I? Huh! I could tell you something, Jane Hemingway, that would humble you to the dust and make you crawl home with your nose to the earth like a whipped dog." Ah, it was true, only too true! Humbled? It was more than that. Pride, hope, even resentment, was gone. She now cowered before her enemy as she had so recently before death itself. For once she keenly felt her own supreme littleness and stood in absolute awe of the mighty personality she had been so long and audaciously combating. Reaching the fence which bounded her own property, Jane got over it with difficulty. She seemed to have lost all physical strength. She saw Sam behind the house, under the spreading, leafless boughs of an apple-tree, repairing a break in the ash-hopper. She could not have explained what impulse prompted it, but she paused in front of him, speaking in a tone he had never heard from her before. "Sam," she said, a stare like the glaze of death in her eyes, "don’t you mention this to my child; do you hear me? Don’t you tell Virginia what we’ve found out. If you do you’ll get your foot into something you’ll be sorry for. Do you hear me, man? This is my business—_mine_, and not a thing for you to treat lightly. If you know what’s good for you, you’ll take my hint and not meddle." "Well, I never!" Sam exclaimed. "Good Lord, woman, what have them two folks done to you down there. I never saw you look so plumb flabbergasted in my life."