"Well, take a chair," she said, awkwardly. "I've got the windows up to let the dust drive out, and I'll close them. It's powerful draughty. I don't feel it, working like I am, but you might, coming in from the outside."
He advanced to one of the straight-backed chairs which he remembered so well, and laid an unsteady hand on it, but he did not draw it towards him nor sit down. Instead, his great, hungry eyes followed her movements, as she bustled from one window to another, like those of a patient, offending dog.
"Well, why don't you sit down?" She had turned back to him, and stood eying his poor aspect with strange misgivings and pity. In her comfort and luxury, he, with his evidences of poverty and despair, struck a strangely discordant note.
He drew the chair nearer, and with quivering knees she saw him sink into it, with firmness at the beginning and then with the sudden collapse of an invalid. She went to a window and looked out. Not seeing his horse hitched near by, she came back to him.
"Where did you hitch?" she asked, her voice losing firmness.
"I didn't have no horse," he said; "I walked, Ann. Lawson was hauling wood with the horse. He wouldn't have let me take it, anyway. He's got awfully contrary here lately. Me 'n' him don't get along at all."
"Do you mean to tell me—do you mean to tell me you walked all that way, in them shoes without bottoms, and—and you looking like you've just got up from a long sick spell?"
"I made it all right, Ann, stopping to rest on the way." A touch of color seemed to have risen into his wan cheeks. "I had to come to-day—as I did awhile back—to do my duty, as I saw it. In fact, this seems even more my duty. Ann, Jane Hemingway came over to Gilmer awhile back. She come straight to my house, and, my God, Ann, she come and told me she'd been at the bottom of all our trouble. She set right in and acknowledged that she lied; she said she'd been lying all along for spite, because she hated you."
"And loved you," Ann interposed, quickly. "Yes, she came back here, so I've been told, and stood up in meeting and said she'd been to see you, and she confessed it all in public. I can't find it in my heart to be hard with her, Joe. She was only obeying her laws of nature, as you have obeyed yours and I have mine, and—and as our offspring is now obeying hers. Tell me the straight truth, Joe. I reckon Nettie still feels strange towards me."
Joe Boyd's mild eyes wavered and sought the fire beyond the toes of his ragged shoes.