"I’ve told you the worst now," Mrs. Waycroft said. "Nettie had heard all that, and so had Lawson. His folks finally agreed to raise no objections to the match if she’d never mention your name. Naturally, when I told her about what I thought _maybe_—you understand, _maybe_—you’d be willing to do she was actually scared. She cried pitifully, and begged me never to allow you to bother her. She said—I told you she looked like a selfish creature—that if the Lawsons were to find out that you’d been sending her messages it might spoil all. I told her it was all a lie of Jane Hemingway’s making out of whole cloth, but the silly girl wouldn’t listen. I thought she was going to have a spasm." They had reached the gate, and, with a firm, steady hand, Ann opened it and held it ajar for her guest to enter before her. They trudged along the gravel walk, bordered with uneven stones, to the porch and went in. On entering the house Ann always took off her bonnet. She seemed to forget its existence now. "Yes, I hate that woman," Mrs. Waycroft heard her mutter, "and if the Lord doesn’t furnish me with some way of getting even I’ll die a miserable death. I could willingly see her writhe on a bed of live coals. No hell could be hot enough for that woman." Ann paused suddenly at the door, and gazed across the green expanse towards Jane’s house. Mrs. Waycroft heard her utter a sudden, harsh laugh. "And I think I see her punishment on the way. I see it—I see it!" "What is it you say you see?" the visitor asked, curiously. "Oh, nothing!" Ann said, and she sat down heavily in her chair and tightly locked her calloused hands in front of her. XI The continuous dry weather during the month of June had caused many springs and a few wells to become dry, and the women of that section found it difficult to get sufficient soft water for the washing of clothes. Mrs. Hemingway, whose own well was fed from a vein of limestone water too hard to be of much use in that way, remembered a certain rock-bottom pool in a shaded nook at the foot of the rugged hill back of her house where at all times of the year a quantity of soft, clear water was to be found; so thither, with a great bundle of household linen tied up in a sheet, she went one morning shortly after breakfast.