“Oh, it’s horrible—horrible!” panted Mrs. Conover, finding voice as the sobs subsided.
“Yes, yes, I know,” soothed Anice. “But it——”
“You don’t know. You can’t know. It isn’t only the horse. It’s everything! I sometimes wonder how I stand it. Each time it seems as if——”
“Don’t! Don’t, dear! You’re overwrought and tired. Let me take you upstairs and——”
“No. It does me good. There’s never been anyone I could talk to. And sometimes I’ve felt I’d give all this abominable money and everything just for one hour’s friendship with anyone who really cared.”
“But I care. Really, really I do. Let me help you, won’t you, please? I want so much to.”
“‘Help’ me?” echoed the weeping woman, with as near an approach to bitterness as her crushed spirit could muster. “Help me? How can anyone help one of Caleb Conover’s slaves? And I am the only one of them all who has no hope of escape. The others can leave him and find work somewhere else. Even the horses he loves to fight have the satisfaction of fighting back. But I haven’t courage enough to do either of those things. What can I do?”
It was the first time in their three years of daily intercourse that Anice Lanier had seen or so much as suspected the existence of this feeble spark of resentment in the older woman’s cowed soul. It dumbfounded her, and left her for the time without power of consoling.
“Do you know, Miss Lanier,” went on Letty, “at one time I hated you? Yes”—as she noted the pained surprise in the girl’s big, tear-swimming eyes—“actually hated you. You were all I was not. You were not afraid of him. He deferred to you. He never deferred to me, or to anyone else but you since he was born. He never cared for me. And he did care for you. If I were to die——”
“Mrs. Conover!”