Bertha raised her hands and clasped them above her head. She drew a long breath, dilating her frame, and looked off where an empty yellow sky circled a fading landscape. "If I could only believe you—ah—if I could only believe you, I should ask no greater happiness in heaven."
"Believe me, I am telling you the truth."
"But—but——"
"Sit down again, child," he said.
The term "child," used constantly by the negroes to express half-humorous or gentle chiding, comes very naturally to Southern lips. It carried with it little suggestion of the difference of age between them, but gave a sense of comradeship and good-will which comforted her. He pulled down a bundle of hay to cushion her seat on the steps.
"Now tell me all the 'buts,'" he said.
"Alas, Mr. Durgan, you cannot scold away our great trouble and my fears. You cannot smile them into insignificance; but now I am willing to tell you our story, and when it is told I hope you will see that you, too, must bury it forever in silence, as I have tried to do."
She began again. "There is another reason, which you don't know yet, why I must tell you now. It is this 'Dolphus. I will try to be quick. Do you know all that was put in the newspapers about us—about the trial?"
Durgan made a sign of assent.
"Day after day the court discussed every detail of our family life and of that awful day—held it up to the whole world with an awful minuteness and intensity. And Hermie was in prison when she was not in court—oh, I wonder we lived—and it was all such a farce. They got hold of everything but the things that mattered. They never came near them.