"No," said Miss Lady, "never, except as they met occasionally here or there. Mrs. Ellison traveled a great deal from time to time, when I was little, before we went to New Orleans, where I went to school with the Sisters. She, my mother--that is, Mrs. Ellison--had money from somewhere, not always very much. Mr. Decherd told me often that he simply was an old friend of hers. I always thought he was a lawyer somewhere in this state. Sometimes he went to St. Louis. We went to New Orleans; and that was the last I saw of him for some years until we came here to the Big House." "That's all you know?" asked Blount. "You don't remember any mother of your own?" "Not in the least." Tears welled from her eyes, and this time Blount did not protest. "Miss Lady," said he, "there are some things we can't clear up yet. We can't prove just yet who was your own mother, but I want to tell you, you were born as far above that sort of life as that there sun is above the earth. No matter how much Decherd loved you, or how much right he had to love you, he couldn't do you anything but wrong and harm, and injury, and shame. As near as we can find out, he was about as bad, and about as sharp a man as ever struck this country. We couldn't hardly believe at first how smooth he was. Miss Lady, we can't tell just what his relations to Mrs. Ellison were. We know they had some kind of an understanding. We know that he was mixed up with Delphine down here on some sort of a basis. We know that he was robbing the railroad here with a list of judgment claims against the road, which he stole in some way. We know he was underneath a heap of this trouble with the niggers down here, and that he used Delphine as a cat's-paw in that. It was his scheme to have other people stir up all the trouble they could, so he could carry on his own devilment behind the smoke. Now we know he was mixed up with those two women somehow. I won't ask you any questions, and won't try to understand why you could have been so blind as not to know your own friends.-- No, Miss Lady, come back here, and sit right down. You've got to take your own medicine, and some day you've got to know your own friends. Now sit down, and hold on till I tell you what I know about this." And so, to a Miss Lady alternately shocked and ashamed, he went on to tell in his own fashion, and to the best of his knowledge, the facts of the strange story which had been canvassed between himself and Eddring long before. The sun was still farther up in the heavens when he had concluded, and when finally he rose to his feet and stood erect before her.