“She did not suffer,” said Latimer.
“I never saw nothin’ of her after the last day she came to Janway’s Mills,” the girl began.
Latimer lifted his eyes suddenly.
“She went to the Mills?” he exclaimed.
“Yes,” she answered, her voice shaking. “I guess she never told. After that first night she stood by me. No one else did. Seemed like other folks thought I’d poison ’em. She’d come an’ see me an’—help me. She was sick the last day she came, and when she was going home she fainted in the street, I heard folks say, I never saw her after that.”
She brushed a tear from her face with the shawl again.
“So as she didn’t mind much, or suffer,” she said, “t’ain’t so bad to think of. She wasn’t one to be able to stand up against things. She’d have died if she’d been me. I’d be glad enough to die myself, if I wasn’t afraid. She’d cry over me when I wasn’t crying over myself. I’ve been beat about till I don’t mind, like I used. They’re a hard lot down at the Mills.”
“And you,” said Latimer, “what sort of a life have you been leading?”
His voice was harsh and his manner repellant only because Nature had served him the cruel turn of making them so. He was bitterly conscious as he spoke of having chosen the wrong words and uttered them with an appearance of relentless rigour which he would have made any effort to soften.
Baird made a quick movement towards the girl.