Gavot dared not look up, and for a moment a death-like silence fell in the hot, tidy room. Jo looked about at her place of safety and freedom and wondered how she could hurry the disturbing element out. Just then Gavot spoke. He had grasped the only straw in sight on the turgid stream. "Mam’selle, you’re not too old yet to bear a child, but you’ll best waste no time." And then he smiled a loathsome smile that had its roots in all that had soiled and killed poor Margot Gavot’s life. Jo recoiled as if something unclean were, indeed, near her. "Don’t," she shuddered warningly, "don’t!" Then quite suddenly she turned upon the man, her eyes blazing, her mouth twisted with revolt and disdain. "I wonder—if you could understand, if I showed you a woman’s heart?" she asked with a curious break in her voice. "Long, long years I’ve ached to show the poor, dead thing lying here," she put her work-hardened hands across her breast, "to someone. There have been times when I have wondered if the telling might not help other women in Point of Pines; might not make men see plainer the wrong they do women; but until now there has never been any one to tell." Expression was crying aloud, and the incongruity of the situation did not strike Jo Morey in her excitement. "You’ve got to hear me out, Pierre Gavot," she went on. "You’ve come, God knows why, to offer me all that you have to give in exchange for—well! I’m going to give you all that I have to give you—all, all! "There was a time, Gavot, when I longed for the thing that most women long for, the thing that made Margot take you—you! She knew her chances, poor soul, but you seemed the only way to her desires, so she took you! "’Tis no shame to a woman to want what her nature cries out for, and the call comes when she’s least able to understand and choose. Here in Point of Pines a girl has small choice. It is all well enough for them who do not know to talk of love and the rest. The burning desire in man and woman is there with or without love; it’s the mercy of God when love is added. I knew what I wanted, all that counted to me must come through man, and love—my own love—sanctified everything for me. I did not understand, I did not try to, I was lifted up——" Jo choked and Gavot twisted uneasily in his chair. This was all very boring, but he must endure it for the time being. "I—I was willing to play the game and take my chances," Jo had got control of herself, "and I never feared, until it was forced upon me, that my ugliness stood in the way. All that I had to offer, and I had much, Gavot, much, counted as nothing with men because their eyes were held by this face of mine and could not see what lay behind. "Perhaps that was God’s way of saving me. I thought that for the first when I saw Margot dying.