She opened the door softly. As there was no light in the girl's room, she was about to close the door and go to bed when she caught a sound that half startled her. Quickly and noiselessly she stepped over the threshold. A shaft of moonlight fell athwart the bed. It was empty. She cast a searching glance about the room. At the window-seat she saw a mass of black curls above the white of a night robe.
Crouching on the floor, her face buried in her arms, alone in this small hour, Belle-Ann was crying in the half gloom. Alone with some great grief that was undoing her. Her shoulders shook with its racking on-coming. Then again, its vortex of agony swept across her lips in piteous supplicatory sobs, vibrating in the stillness like the bleating of a dazed, lost creature enmeshed in the tentacles of some merciless destroyer.
Motionless, Miss Worth stood for a minute, her mind divided by two opposing conjectures. One, a deplorable apprehension that this girl she had come to love so dearly was assailed by some new sudden visitation of suffering. The other, a keen, pungent joy that perhaps that for which she herself had striven and labored for months was coming to pass. Maybe after all the blighting soul-fistula she had so deftly and tirelessly probed for had burst and its poisonous feculence was now eddying away.
Until a month ago Belle-Ann had, with the natural reluctance and reserved suspicion of the mountain-born, withstood and parried all of Miss Worth's gentle approaches to discover her secret woe. The mountain spirit nurtures a bitter antipathy for revelations. Then a day came when this dear friend broke through the barrier, and Belle-Ann poured out her whole life to Miss Worth. There was no detail or memory that she did not vividly picture before Miss Worth's understanding. Then Miss Worth, knowing where to look, reached out with all the potent power of her subjugating diplomacy to extirpate the roots of this melancholy plant that grew and threatened to overrun a beautiful soul.
Miss Worth hurried across the room and spoke her name. With distress undisguised, Belle-Ann lifted her tear-wet face.
"Oh!—I can't—I cannot endure it longer," she declared between the tremulous sobs that convulsed her.
Miss Worth knelt beside the girl and with her arms around her, she talked in soothing undertones. For almost an hour the two sat clinging together. Not a minute had Miss Worth's voice ceased. As the girl huddled, listening tensely, the tears ceased and dried on her distressed face. Presently, she arose and walked aimlessly around the room.
"But you-all don't believe as we do," she said. "Our people are shot down in their own yards, and when we call upon the law, the law only turns the assassin loose. Then the law itself comes to kill. Oh—Oh, dear Miss Worth—you can never understand—you can never know what this is. Only we up thah who suffer these things know its sting. Who could go on and live without redress and not strike back? If you had suffered this as I have—if you could see what I have—if you could see now—this minute—what I see—thah—thah——" she ended in stifling utterances, as she stared at a spot of moonlight that had strayed across the floor.
Now, totally oblivious to her whereabouts, and utterly unconscious of Miss Worth's presence, she fell to her knees on the floor, stretching her arms out over the pallid beam, in benediction, and lowered her hands to fondle the face that her fevered fancy held there; and to touch the still, immobile bosom with its bullet-spot. And again her grief broke loose beyond restraint and she sobbed aloud. A great lump had brought an ache into Miss Worth's throat, and she, too, was crying. She lifted the girl up and led her back to the window-seat. Here she whispered solace to her for a time.
Finally, Miss Worth arose and left Belle-Ann at the window. When she reached the door she turned back.