"You remember yourself how disgusted the authorities were when he trotted about like a homeless dog and insisted on being arrested for a crime they knew he didn't commit. Poor old Tenney! they said, any man might be crazed, losing his wife and child in one week. They were very gentle with him. They told him if he hung round talking much longer he'd be late for his planting. Of course the doctor did set the pace. He'd told, everywhere he went, how Tira had sent for him at once, and how she had said she had, in that hideous country phrase, 'overlaid' the child. One interesting psychological part of it has persisted to this day: the effect Tira had on the doctor, his entire belief in her simple statement which she was never asked to swear to. (You remember there was no inquest.) He never, he said, was so sorry for a woman in his life. He seems to have been so determined to prove her a tragic figure that he wouldn't for a moment have the disaster lightened by denying her that last misfortune of having done it herself. Lots of these things I haven't told you, they're so grim and, to me now, so wearing. They've got on all our nerves like the devil, and I fancy even the Wake Hill natives are pretty well fed up with 'em. At first they couldn't get enough. When Tenney couldn't get the law to believe in him so far as to indict him, the embattled farmers took it on themselves to cross-examine him, not because they thought for a minute he was guilty, but because they itched to hear him say so: drama, don't you see? And he never wavered in asserting he did it: only when they asked him how, he just stared, and once told a particularly smart Alec, he guessed it was a man's own business how he killed his own child. And he stayed up in the hut, just as he was doing when you went away, and night after night I had to stay with him. Stuck to me like a burr and wore me threadbare asking if he was forgiven, and if that didn't mean he was whiter than snow. I tell you, Dick, it was all so involved that I believe, although he used the set phrases about the Lord Jesus Christ, he really believed it was I that had forgiven him. He used to ask me to tell God to do it for my sake; and I remembered Old Crow and how he played up to Billy Jones, and, if you'll believe it, I _did_ ask God (though not for my sake!), and horrible as it is, grotesque as it is (no, by George, it isn't grotesque to speak to a man in the only language he can understand! he wanted God and he couldn't any more reach Him! he had to climb up on another man's shoulders), well, I told him it was all right. He was forgiven. Then he scared me blue by saying he was going round preaching the gospel--his farm is sold, you know, stock gone, everything wiped out--and I told him he'd proved too dangerous to be let loose on the world again. But he had me there. He asked if he was forgiven, why wasn't he whiter than snow? And he hung to me like my shadow, and asked