Sarah was stirring the gruel, and she appeared so absorbed in her task that the remark she let fall a minute later bore presumably no relation to the conversation. "I sometimes think men ain't got any mo' sense than an unborn babe!" she observed. Taking the cup from her hands, Abel went up the little staircase to the bedroom, where Judy stood before the bureau, with a long black-headed hat pin in her hand. She had evidently not begun to undress, for her hat was still on her head, and under the heavy shadow of the brim her eyes looked back at her husband with an accusing and hostile expression. "Drink this, Judy, while it is hot," he said kindly, placing the cup on the bureau. "I don't want it," she answered, and her voice sounded as if she were ready to burst again into tears. "Are you sick?" "No." "I'm going to sleep in the attic. Call me if you want anything." Without replying she took off her hat and placed it on the top shelf in the wardrobe. Had he beaten her she felt that she could almost have loved him, but the primitive sex instinct in her was outraged by his gentleness. "Has anybody hurt your feelings?" asked Abel, turning suddenly on his way to the door. "No." "Then, for God's sake, what is it?" he demanded, at his wit's end. "You look as if you'd lost the last friend you had on earth." At this she broke into hard dry sobs which rattled in her throat before they escaped. A spasm of self-pity worked convulsively in her bosom, and, turning away, she buried her face in her arms, while the long, agonized tremors shook her slender figure. Looking at her, he remembered bitterly that he had married Judy in order to make her happy. By the sacrifice of his own inclinations he had achieved this disastrous result. If he had tried to do evil instead of good, he could hardly have wrought more irreparable mischief--and with the thought, pity, which had led him astray, winged off, like an ironic sprite, and left his heart empty of comfort. "God knows I am sorry for you, Judy," he said in the effort to reinforce his compassion. But Judy, though she was avid of sympathy, did not crave an expression of it from her husband--for her temperament was of the morbid kind that is happiest when it is most miserable. Her heart had fed upon the sustenance of her brain until the abnormal enlargement of that single organ had prepared her for inevitable suffering at the hands of men--if not from actual unkindness, yet from an amiable neglect which could cut even more deeply. She turned in the direction of sentiment as instinctively as a plant turns toward light, and the Reverend Orlando Mullen had had predecessors in her affections who had been hardly so much as aware of her existence.