"Are you sure?"
"I am sure. I told them where to bury it; I showed them the very spot—under the cedar. They told me they had. Why?"
I thought it better that she should learn the truth.
"You know we can't trust our negroes. They disobeyed you. They lied to you; they never buried it. They threw it on the ash-pile. The pigs tore it to pieces; I saw them; they were rooting at it and tearing it to pieces."
She had clasped her hands, and turned towards me in acute distress.
After a while, with her face aside, she said, slowly,
"And you have believed that I knew of this—that I permitted it?"
"I have believed nothing. I have waited to understand."
A few minutes later she said, as if to herself,
"Many a person would have been only too glad to believe it, and to blame me." Then folding her hands over one of mine, she said, with tears in her eyes:
"Promise me—promise me, Adam, until we are married, and—yes, after we are married—as long as I live, that you will never believe anything of me until you know that it is true!"