"She’s always been a queer creature," Boyd faltered, evasively, without looking up, and she saw him nervously laving his bony hands in the sheer, unsuggestive emptiness about him. "But you mustn’t think it’s just _you_ she’s against, Ann. She’s plumb gone back on me, too. The money you furnished cleared the place of debt and bought her wedding outfit, and she got her man; but not long back she found out where the means come from, and—" Ann’s lips tightened in the pause that ensued. Her face was set like a grotesque mask of stone. She leaned over the fire and pushed a fallen ember back under the steaming logs with a poker. "She couldn’t stomach that, I reckon?" Ann said, in assumed calmness. "Well, it made her mad at me. I won’t tell you all she done or said, Ann. It wouldn’t do no good. I’m responsible for what she is, I reckon. She might have growed up different if she’d had the watchful care of—of a mother. What she is, is what any female will become under the care of a shiftless man like I am." "No, you are wrong, Joe," Ann said. "Why it is so I don’t intend to explain, but Nettie would have been like she is under all circumstances. Money and plenty of everything might have glazed her character over, but down at bottom she’d have been what she is. Adversity generally brings out all the good that’s in a person; the reason it hasn’t fetched it out in her is because it isn’t there, nor never has been. You say you and her don’t get on well?" "Not now," he said. "She just as good as driv me from home yesterday. She told me point-blank that there wasn’t room for me, and that when the baby comes they would be more crowded and pinched than ever. She actually sent Lawson to the Ordinary at Springtown to see if there was a place on the poor-farm vacant. When I dropped onto that, Ann, I come off. For all I know, they may have some paper for vagrancy ready to serve on me. I don’t know where I’m going, but I’m not going back to them two, never while there is a lingering breath left in my body." "The poor-farm!" Ann said, half to herself. "To think that she would consent to that, and you her father." "I think his folks is behind it, Ann. They’ve got a reason for wanting to get rid of me." "A reason, you say?" Ann was staring at him steadily.