“She––she’s my child!”
“Presently, daughter.”
Judith wept again.
“Sir!” Elizabeth gasped––bewildered, terrified.
“Not now, daughter.”
All the anger and complaint had gone out of Elizabeth’s eyes; they were now filled with wonder and apprehension. Flashes of intelligence appeared and failed and came again. It seemed to me, who watched, that in some desperate way, with her broken mind, she tried to solve the mystery of this refusal. Then ’twas as though some delusion––some terror of her benighted state––seized upon her: alarm changed to despair; she rose in bed, but put her hand to her heart and fell back.
“He better stop it!” Aunt Esther All muttered.
The four wives of Whisper Cove bitterly murmured against her.
“He’s savin’ her soul,” said William Buttle’s wife.