"But it was more than even that. In his meanness and baseness he knew, in some measure, what it was I felt for him, and it gave him a twisted satisfaction to be admired and cherished by a native lass, who meant to him less than nothing." Again she paused, as if herself overwhelmed by the memory. "In time I became pregnant," she said, in a voice almost sad. "And all my confused, forlorn affection became the more profound. For he had stirred inside me what even John could not: a child of my own. "So on the last night that he came to me, as we lay panting side by side---for I had not resisted him..... I looked over at him in the gentle candlelight, and with the trembling emotions of a lifetime, told him that I loved him, loved his son, and now would bear his child. To think that in that moment I half fancied he would take me in his arms, and ask me to marry him. "He laughed at me! So utterly cold and cruel. Then as he came back to himself he seized me by the wrists, and swore that no child of his would be born to a scheming slut---his very words---the likes of me. And he beat me, as if trying to snuff out the lives of both of us. I honestly believe he would have done it, if fear of losing his position had not intervened. "Then he dragged me by the hair, down the long hallway, and threw me out into the cold Winter night, with only the torn nightdress wrapped about my battered limbs. The last words he said as I ran from the house in tears, were that if anyone ever learned the child was his, he would kill us both. And he meant it." Mary was crying now for both of them, feeling as if she, too, had been beaten and raped. "How could he?" was all she could manage. "How?" asked the old woman, half mocking, half in earnest. "For a man like that it was as easy as breathing. `The shark will strike and the spider spin, The mad dog kill, and kill again Until he is killed in his turn.' Remember that, Mary. It is the way of things." "But why....." It seemed almost cruel to ask, but she had to. "Why the charade of my being Anne's child? Why couldn't you and I have had each other, at least?" "Aye, that. Well." And for the first time that night, through all the gruesome details, the woman found herself at a loss, as if this alone still caused in her something akin to remorse. "At first it was the family honor. It was as easy to cloister the two of us, as one. And then. "I tried to poison myself a short time after you were born, as only your life inside me had prevented my doing before. As much as I wanted to love and care for you, as the innocent babe you were..... "It all became too much for me, Mary, and my brother's death was the final blow. I just wanted it to end. They say I went quite mad for a time, if endless loss, and a death-like sense of oppression be madness.