I subjected Mary Smiley to all the tortures I could devise. She lived with me though she was John Smiley’s wife. She was a silly, childish creature and she was absolutely at my mercy. I made her life a hell for several years. In the meantime, her little girl was growing--into a tiny image of Keturah Hawkins. It was that which conquered me, or the settled wickedness within me. I, who had set out to wreak remotely my revenge on Keturah Hawkins, was myself becoming the victim of a living punishment. For here was Keturah Hawkins in the house with me. Every physical characteristic was there in the child later known as Mermaid Smiley, the daughter of John Smiley and Mary Rogers Smiley, the grandniece of the woman I remembered. The child had Keturah Hawkins’s hair, eyes, skin, and features; even, in embryo, her manner. I could torture her silly and pitiable mother and the child would enter the room, a living taunt to me. Here she was, and she would outlive me; she would be flesh and blood, wonderful glinting hair, flashing blue eyes, matchless white skin, unconquerably alive and superb, unconquerably young and gay when I was not merely a cruel and old and despicable man, but dust. She would dance on my grave. I stood it as long as I could and then something happened within me, a mental overthrow comparable to the physical defeats I had suffered because of Keturah Hawkins. Something in the continual presence of that child rained blows upon me until I was numb in my mind, until I couldn’t think or plan at all, until the torture I could inflict on her mother was a meaningless thing; and there had always been a terrible futility about it for the reason that I could not make my revenge anywhere near complete and satisfactory. I could not, for instance, communicate to John and Keturah Smiley the triumph of vengeance that was mine. John Hawkins was not alive to witness it; Keturah Hawkins----Was she alive, in the person of that child, to see it? Perhaps, and perhaps she was alive in the person of that child to thwart it. She would beat me down; dead or living she would best me. A superstitious, or perhaps a holy, terror laid hold of me so that I dared not lay hands on the little girl, or even say to her things that might bring tears to childish eyes. I dared not, I tell you! And besides, it would be laying hands on Keturah herself.