"Oh, you poor, poor little sniffling idiot!" Jane said, as she drew her thin legs out from the coverings and rested her feet on the floor and leaned forward. "All this time you’ve been thinking, in your grand way, that you were doing a kindness to her, when she was just using you as a tool, to devil me. Huh! didn’t she throw it up to me once at the wash-place where she and I met? She told me to my teeth that something was coming that would bring my face to the earth in shame. I thought she knew about the cancer, and was gloating over it; but she wasn’t speaking of that, for when I came back from Atlanta, sound and whole, she hurled her hints at me again. She said she knew nothing about the cancer at that time, but that she still knew something that would make me slink from the faces of men and women like a whipped hound. I discovered what she meant to-day. She meant that because my testimony had something to do with Joe Boyd’s leaving with _her_ child, she had won over _mine_ to herself. That’s been her mean and sneaking plot all this time, in which she has been decoying you from a respectable roof and making you her easy tool—the tool with which she expected to stab at my pride and humble me in the eyes of everybody." "Mother, stop!" Virginia turned and sat down again on the bed. "That woman shall not have another—not one other—_false_ charge piled up around her. God knows I don’t see how I can tell you _all_ the truth, but it is due to her now. It will more than justify her, and that’s my duty. Listen, and don’t interrupt me. I want to go straight through this, and when I have finished you may turn from me and force me to go to her for a home. You have never dreamed that I could do what I am about to confess I did. I am not going to excuse myself, either. What I did, I did. The shame of it, now that I see clearly, is killing me. No, stop! Let me go on. I have been receiving the attentions of Langdon Chester in secret. After the first time you saw us together and objected so strongly, I told him not to come to the house again; but, like many another silly girl, I was hungry for admiration, and met him elsewhere. I loved to hear the nice things he said, although I didn’t always believe them. He—he tried to induce me to do a number of imprudent things, which, somehow, I was able to refuse, as they concerned my own pleasure alone; but then you began to worry about the money to go to Atlanta on. Day by day you grew more and more despondent and desperate as every effort failed, and one day, when you were down at the lowest ebb of hope, he told me that he—do you understand, mother?—Langdon Chester told me that he thought he could get up the money, but that no one must know that he—" "Oh, my God, don’t, don’t, don’t!" Jane groaned. "Don’t tell me that you—"