"Well, he looked good surprised," Mrs. Waycroft went on, "but you know he’s kind o’ resentful if folks don’t show consideration for his convenience, so he looked down at her over his specks and said: "’Well, sister, I reckon the best time for that will be after preaching, and then them that want to stay can do so and feel that they got what they waited for.’ "’But I can’t wait,’ said she. ’What I’ve got to say must be said now, while I’m plumb in the notion. If I waited I might back out, and I don’t want to do it.’ "Well, he give in; and, Ann, she turned around facing us all and took off her bonnet and swung it about like a flag. She was as nigh dead in looks as any corpse I ever saw. And since you was born, Ann, you never heard the like. Folks was so interested that they stared as if their eyes was popping out of their sockets. She said she’d come to confess to crime—that’s the way she put it—_crime!_ She said she’d been passing for half a lifetime in this community as a Christian woman, when in actuality she had been linked body and soul to the devil. Right there she gulped and stood with her old head down; then she looked at us like a crazy person and went on. She said away back when she was a girl she’d been jealous of a certain girl, and that she’d hounded that girl through a long life. She had made it her particular business to stir up strife against that woman by toting lies from one person to another. She turned sort o’ sideways to the preacher and said: ’Brother Bazemore, what I told you Ann Boyd said about you that time was all made up—a lie out of whole cloth. I told you that to make you denounce her in public, and you did. I kept telling her neighbors things to make ’em hate her, and they did. I told her husband a whole string of deliberate lies that made him leave her and take her child away. I spent half my life at this thing, to have it end like this: Men and women, the woman that I was doing all that against was the one who came up with the money that saved my worthless life and tried to hide it from me and the rest of the world. She not only done that, but she done me even a greater favor. I won’t say what that was, but nobody but an angel from heaven, robed in the flesh of earth, could have done that, for it was the very thing she had every right to want to see visited on me. That act would have paid me back in my own coin, and she wanted to count out the money, but she was too much of heaven to go through it. Instead of striking at me, she saved me suffering that would have dragged me to the dust in shame. I’ve come here to say all this because I want to do her justice, if I can, while the breath of life is in me. I’ve just got back from Gilmer, where I went and met the man whose life I wrecked—her husband. I told him the truth, hoping that I could do him some good in atonement, but the poor, worn-out man seemed too utterly crushed to forgive me.’"