"What I told you that morning, Joe, was a cold, deliberate lie!"
"A—a—" he stammered. "No, no, you don't mean that—you can't mean—"
"Every—single—thing—I—told—you—that—day—was—a—lie!" Jane said, with an emphatic pause between each word.
"I can't understand. I don't see—really, Jane, you can't mean that what you said about Chester's going there day after day when my back was turned, and that you saw them together in the woods below your house that day when I was—"
"Everything I told you was a lie from the devil, out of the very fumes of hell," Jane said, pulling off her bonnet and looking him squarely in the face. "A lie—a lie, Joe."
"Oh, my God!" Boyd cried. "And I, all these years I have—"
"You've been believing what I said. But I'm not through yet. I've been in a dark room fasting and praying for a month to overcome my evil inclination not to speak the truth, and I finally conquered, so I'm going to tell the whole thing. Joe, Ann Boyd is the best woman God ever let live. She was as true as steel to you from the day she married till now. I have been after her day and night, never giving her a moment's rest from my persecutions, and how do you reckon she retaliated? She paid me back by actually saving my worthless life and trying to keep me from knowing who did it. She did something else. She did me the greatest favor one woman could possibly do another. I don't intend to say what that particular thing was, but she must have the credit. Now I'm through. I'm going back home."
Boyd drew his ill-clad feet towards him. He spread out his two arms wide and held them so, steadily. "Look at me—just look at me," he said. "Woman, before you go back, take one good look at me. You come to me—a mere frazil of what I once was—when there is no hope of ever regaining my youth and self-respect—and tell me—oh, my God!—tell me that I believed you instead of her! She said, with tears in her eyes, on her knees before me, that that first mistake was all, and I told her she lied in her throat, and left her, dragging from her clinging arms the child of her breast, bringing it up and raising it to what you see she is. And now you come literally peeping into my open coffin and telling this to my dead face. Great God, woman, before Heaven I feel like striking you where you set, soaked in repentance though you are. All these misspent years I've been your cowardly tool, and her—her—"
"I deserve it—talk on!" Jane Hemingway said, as she rose and clutched her carpet-bag and held it tremblingly.
But Joe Boyd's innate gentleness had been one of the qualities many women loved, and even before the cowering creature who had wrecked his life he melted in manly pity.