"Well, I think I can make a good guess," he said, awkwardly twirling his fingers round and round. "You see, I always make a habit, when I happen to meet anybody from over your way, of asking about old acquaintances, and I heard some time back that you was in deep trouble. They said you had some high-priced doctoring to do in Atlanta, and that you was going from old friend to old friend for what little help they could give. I'm going to see what I can do towards it myself, since you've taken such a long trip, though, Jane, to tell you the truth, I haven't actually seen a ten-cent piece in a month. I've gone without tobacco when I thought the desire for it would run me distracted. So—"
"I didn't come for help—Lord, Lord, I only wish it was that, Joe. I've already had the operation, and I'm recovering. I've come over here, Joe, to make an awful confession."
"A—a—what?" he said.
There was a pause. Jane Hemingway unrolled her bonnet and put it on, pulling the hood down over her line of vision.
"Joe, I've come to tell you that I've been a bad woman; I've been a bad, sinning woman since away back there when you married Ann. Things you used to say to me, I reckon, turned my silly head. You remember when you took me to camp-meeting that night, and we sat through meeting out in the buggy under the trees. I reckon, if it was all to do over you wouldn't have said so much. I reckon you wouldn't if you'd known you were planting a seed that was going to fructify and bear the fruit of hate and enmity that would never rot; but, for all I know, you may have been saying the same things to other girls who knew better how to take them than I did."
"Oh, Jane, I was a fool them days," Joe Boyd broke in, with an actual flush of shame in his tanned face.
"Well, never mind about that," Jane went on, with a fresher determination under his own admission. "I reckon I let it take too strong a hold on me. I never could give up easy, and when you got to going with Ann, and she was so much prettier and more sprightly than me, it worked against my nature. It hardened me, I reckon. I married soon after you did, but I won't tell about that; he's dead and gone. I had my child—that was all, except—except my hate for Ann. I couldn't stand to see you and her so happy together, and you both were making money and I was losing what I had. Then, Joe, we all heard about—we all learned Ann's secret."
"Don't—for the love of mercy—don't fetch that up!" Boyd groaned.
"But I have to, Joe," Jane persisted, softly. "At first I was the happiest woman that the devil ever delighted by flashing a lying promise with his fire on a wall. I thought you were going to scorn her, but I saw that day I met you at the meeting-house that you were inclined to condone the past, and that drove me wild; so I—" Jane choked up and paused.
"I remember that day," Joe Boyd said, with a deep breath. "I'll never forget it as long as I live, for what you said dropped me back into the bottomless pit of despair. I'd been trying to think she'd been straight with me since we married, but when you—"