Kate's face softened. "Poor child! If it's nothing worse than a headache!—Now, then, my girl, I want to tell you what your 'goodness' might have done for Jacqueline." Her voice became harder and sterner than Mag had ever heard it. "Should you like to see her such a creature as you were before I brought you here, hunted, looked down upon, ashamed to face people—the kind of woman that the Night Riders try to drive out of decent communities?"
The girl cowered away from her. "Miss Jacky like me? Oh, she couldn't be, not ever! She's a lady," she cried piteously. "Her fella would have married her—you'd 'a' made him!"
"He could not, as it happens. He would have turned her, perhaps, into just such an outcast as you were, and you helping him! This is the return you have made me for my charity, Mag Henderson!"
The girl crouched with her face hidden, as if she expected a beating. "I didn't know, I didn't know!" she moaned. "I just wanted her to be happy with her fella—What you goin' to do with me, Miss Kate?"
"God knows," said the other bitterly.
Mag caught at her skirts, lifting her face in abject pleading. "Whatever you does to me, don't send little Kitty away! Don't git a mad on the baby! Say you won't, Miss Kate, say you won't!"
"Nonsense!" Kate spoke more gently. "Nobody's going to 'do' anything to you, or to the baby, either. I suppose you cannot help your ignorance. That's our job.—But it is evident that you can't be trusted."
"Yes'm, I kin!" sobbed the girl, childishly. "Yes'm, I kin, too! Just you try me."
"Very well, I'll try you." Kate made a quick decision. "Listen to me, Mag! It was I who met Mr. Channing and—persuaded him to go away. But Jacqueline does not know this, and she must never know it. I will not have my girl shamed before her mother. She must think he went off of his own accord, because he was afraid to take her.—Do you understand?"
Mag nodded, sniffling.