“Pride!” she muttered, as the old woman's steps rang in the corridor. “Pride is only a word. _This! this!_”--she struck her breast--“is my soul under a knife. Why did I sit still while she was talking and not tell her that he was _good--good_--as good a man as ever drew human breath? Why didn't I tell her what Pole Baker's wife told me about his carrying food at midnight on his shoulder (through the swamp, wet to his waist) to her and the children, when Pole was off on a spree--making her swear almost on a Bible that she never would tell? And why didn't I tell her what Mrs. Baker said about his sitting down on the children's bed when they were asleep and talking so beautifully about their futures, and all the sadness of his own childhood and his anxiety to know who and what he was? What if he _did_ meet that Minnie Wade, and she and he--_Oh, my God!_” She stood staring at her pale face in her mirror, and then tottered back to the bed and sank upon it, sitting erect, her tense hands clutching her knees, as if for support against some invisible torrent that was sweeping her away. “Dead--oh! and for _that_ reason--he, Nelson Floyd!” Suddenly a sound fell on her ears. She sprang to her feet, straining her hearing to catch a repetition of it, her eyes wide, the blood of new life bounding in her veins. There it was again, the soft, mellow, insistent call of the whippoorwill from down by the grape-arbor. For a moment she stood still, crying to herself with an inward voice that had no sound: “Alive! Alive! Alive!” Then blowing out her candle, she sprang to the door of her chamber, and opened it, and passed on to the outer one, that was never locked, and which opened on the front porch. But there, with her hand on the knob, she paused, clutching it tightly, but not turning the bolt. Alive; yes, alive, but why? how could it be unless--unless he had killed Jeff Wade? Ah, that was it--red-handed, and fleeing from the arm of the law of man and God, he had come to say good-bye. A memory of her past determination never to meet him clandestinely flashed through her brain, but it was like overhead lightning that touches nothing, only warns man of its power and dies away. She turned the bolt and passed out into the night, running, it seemed, almost with the dragging feet of one in a nightmare, towards the trysting-place. “Ah, here you are!” Nelson Floyd stood in the door-way of the little arbor, his arms outstretched. She allowed him to catch her cold, bloodless hands and lead her to the rustic seat within. They sat down together. She felt his strong arm encompass her but had not the strength or will to resist. He pressed his cheek down on her cold brow, then his lips, and clasped one of her hands with his big warm one. Still she could not put him off. It was like a perplexing dream. There was the horror, and yet here was vague reassurance that at once inspired hope and benumbed her.