"I reckon you are Nettie Boyd, ain't you?" Jane said.
"I used to be," the young woman answered. "I married a Lawson—Sam Lawson—awhile back."
"Oh yes, I forgot that. I'd heard it, too, of course, but it slipped my memory. I'm a Hemingway, from over in Murray County—Jane Hemingway. I used to be acquainted with your pa. Is he handy?"
"Yes, he was here just a minute ago," Ann Boyd's daughter answered. "He's around at his hay-stack pulling down some roughness for the cow. Go in and take a seat and I'll call him. Lay your bonnet on the bed and make yourself at home."
Jane went into the cabin, the walls of which were unlined, being only the bare logs with the bark on them. The cracks where the logs failed to fit closely together were filled with the red clay from the hills around. There was not a picture in sight, not an ornament on the crude board shelf over the rugged mud-and-stone fireplace. From wooden pegs driven in auger-holes in the walls hung the young bride's meagre finery, in company with what was evidently her husband's best suit of clothes and hat. Beneath them, on the floor, stood a pair of new woman's shoes, dwarfed by contrast to a heavier and larger masculine pair. Jane sat down, rolling her bonnet in her stiff fingers. The chair she sat on was evidently of home make, for the rockers were unevenly sawed, and, on the unplaned boards of the floor, it had a joggling, noisy motion when in use. There were two beds in the room, made of rough, pine planks. The coverings of the beds were not in order and the pillows were soiled.
"If she'd 'a' stayed on with Ann she would 'a' made a better house-keeper than that," Jane mused. "She's a sight, too, with her hair uncombed and dress so untidy so soon after the honeymoon. I can see now that her and Ann never would get on together. Anybody could take one look at that girl and see she's selfish. I wonder what that fellow ever saw in her?"
There was a sound of voices outside. With a start, Jane drew herself erect. The carpet-bag on her knees threatened to fall, and she lowered it to the floor. Her ordeal was before her.
"Why, howdy do?"
Joe Boyd, in tattered shirt, trousers patched upon patches, and gaping shoes through which his bare toes showed, stood in the doorway. That the old beau and the once most popular young man of the country-side could stand looking like that before her, even after the lapse of all those trying years, and not feel abashed, was one of the inexplicable things that rushed through Jane Hemingway's benumbed brain. That she, herself, could be looking at the very husk of the ideal of manhood she had held all those years and not cry out in actual pain over the pitiful evidences of his collapse from his high estate was another thing she marvelled over. Joe Boyd! Could it actually be he? Could those gaunt, talon-nailed members, with their parchment-like skin, be the hands she used to think so shapely? Could those splaying feet be the feet that had tripped more lightly in the Virginia Reel than those of any other man for miles around? Could those furtive, harsh-glancing eyes be the deep, dreamy ones in which she had once seen the mirage of her every girlish hope? Could that rasping tone come from the voice whose never diminishing echo had rung in her ears through all those years of hiding her secret from the man she had married out of "spite," through all her long tooth-in-flesh fight with the rival who had temporarily won and held him?
She rose and gave him her hand, and the two stood facing each other, she speechless, he thoroughly at his indolent ease.