"You know why I refused him," Virginia said, in a low voice. "You, of all persons, will know that."

"I don't know as I do," Ann said, with a probing expression in her eyes.

"I don't know, unless, after all, you have a leaning for that young scamp, who has no more real honor than a convict in his stripes. Women are that way, except in very rare cases. The bigger the scoundrel and the meaner he treats them the more they want him. If it's that, I am not going to upbraid you. Upbraiding folks for obeying the laws of nature is the greatest loss of wind possible. If you really love that scamp, no power under high heaven will turn you."

"Love him? I loathe him!" burst pa.s.sionately from Virginia's lips.

"Then what under the sun made you treat Luke King as you did?" asked Ann, almost sternly.

"Because I could not marry him," said the girl, firmly. "I'd rather die than accept the love and devotion of a man as n.o.ble as he is after-after-oh, you know what I mean!"

"Oh, I see-I see," Ann said, her brows meeting. "There comes another law of nature. I reckon if you feel that way, any argument I'd put up would fall on deaf ears."

"I could never accept his love and confidence without telling him all that took place that night, and I'd kill myself rather than have him know," declared the girl.

"Oh, _that's_ the trouble!" Ann exclaimed. "Well, I hope all that will wear away in time. It's fortunate that you are not loved by a narrow fool, my child. Luke King has seen a lots of the world in his young life."

"He has not seen enough of the world to make him overlook a thing of that kind, and you know it," Virginia sighed. "I really believe the higher a man becomes spiritually the higher his ideal of a woman is. I know what he thinks of me now, but I don't know what he would think if he knew the whole truth. He must never be told that, Mrs. Boyd. G.o.d knows I am grateful to you for all you have done, but you must not tell him that."

Ann put down her sheet and went to the fireplace, and with the tip of her coa.r.s.e, gaping shoe she pushed some burning embers under a three-legged pot on the stone hearth. With her tongs she lifted the iron lid and looked at a corn-pone browning within, and then she replaced it.

Her brow was deeply wrinkled.

"You told me everything that happened that night, if I remember right,"

she said, tentatively. "In fact, I know you did."

Virginia said nothing; her thoughts seemed elsewhere.

Leaning the tongs against the fireplace, Ann came forward and bent over her almost excitedly.

"Look here, child," she said, "you told me that-that I got there in time. You told me-"

"I told you all I thought was necessary for you to understand the situation," said Virginia, her eyes downcast, "but I didn't tell you all I'd have to tell Luke King-to be his wife."

"You say you didn't." Ann sat down heavily in her chair. "Then be plain with me; what under the sun did you leave out?"

"I left out the fact that I was crazy that night," said Virginia. "I read in a book once that a woman is so const.i.tuted that she can't see reason in anything which does not coincide with her desires. I saw only one thing that night that was worth considering. I saw only the awful suffering of my mother and the chance to put an end to it by getting hold of that man's money. Do you understand now? I went there for that purpose. I'd have laid down my life for it. When those men came he urged me to run and hide in his room, as he and I stood on the veranda, and it was not fear of exposure that drove me up the stairs holding to his hand. It was the almost appalling fear that the promised money would slip through my fingers if I didn't obey him to the letter. And when he whispered, with his hot breath in my ear, there in his room, as his friends were loudly knocking at the door below, that he would rid himself of them and come back, and asked me if I'd wait, I said yes, as I would, have said it to G.o.d in heaven. Then he asked me if it was '_a promise_,' and I said yes again. Then he asked me, Mrs. Boyd, he asked me-"

Virginia's voice died out. She fell to quivering from head to foot.

"Well, well, go on!" Ann said, under her breath. "Go on. What did he ask you?"

Virginia hesitated for another minute, then, with her face red with shame, she said: "He asked me to prove it by-kissing him-kissing him of my own free will. I hesitated, I think. Yes, I hesitated, but I heard the steps of the men in the hall below at the foot of the stairs. I thought of the money, Mrs. Boyd, and I kissed him."

"You did?"

"Yes. I did-there, _in his room_!"

"Well, I'm glad you told me that," Ann breathed, deeply. "I think I understand it better now. I understand how you feel."

"So you see, all that's what I'd have to tell Luke King," Virginia said; "and I'll never do it-never on this earth. I want him always to think of me as he does right now."

Ann locked her big hands in her lap and bent forward.

"I see my greatest trouble is going to lie with you," she said. "You are conscientious. Millions of women have kept worse things than that from their husbands and never lost a wink of sleep over them, but you seem to be of a different stripe. I think Luke King is too grand a man to hold that against you, under all the circ.u.mstances. I think so, but I don't know men any better than they know women, and I'm not going to urge you one way or the other. I thought my easy-going husband would do me justice, but he couldn't have done it to save his neck from the loop. In my opinion there never will be any happy unions between men and women till men quit thinking so much about the weakness of women's _bodies_ and so little of the strength of their _souls_. The view you had that night of the dark valley of a living death, and your escape from it, has lifted you into a purity undreamt of by the average woman. If Luke King's able to comprehend that, he may get him a wife on the open mountain-top; if not, he can find her in the bushes at the foot. He'll obey his natural law, as you and I will ours."

XXIX

In dire dread of facing the anger of his father, who was expected back from Savannah, for having sold the horse which the Colonel himself was fond of riding, and being in the lowest dregs of despondency and chagrin over the humiliating turn his affair with Virginia had taken, Langdon Chester packed his travelling-bag and hurried off to Atlanta.

There he had a middle-aged bachelor cousin, Chester Sively, who was as fair an example as one could well find of the antebellum Southern man of the world carried forward into a new generation and a more active and progressive environment. Fortunately for him, he had inherited a considerable fortune, and he was enabled to live in somewhat the same ease as had his aristocratic forebears. He had a luxurious suite of rooms in one of the old-fashioned houses in Peachtree Street, where he always welcomed Langdon as his guest, in return for the hospitality of the latter during the hunting season on the plantation.

"Another row with the head of the house?" he smiled, as he rose from his easy-chair at a smoking-table to shake hands with the new arrival, who, hot and dusty, had alighted from a rickety cab, driven by a sleepy negro in a battered silk top-hat, and sauntered in, looking anything but cheerful.

"Why did you think that?" Langdon asked, after the negro had put down his bag and gone.

"Why? Oh, because it has been brewing for a long time, old chap," Sively smiled; "and because it is as natural for old people to want to curb the young as it is for them to forget their own youth. When I was up there last, Uncle Pres could scarcely talk of anything but your numerous escapades."

"We didn't actually have the _row_," Langdon sighed, "but it would have come if I hadn't lit out before he got back from Savannah. The truth is"-the visitor dropped his eyes-"he has allowed me almost no pocket-money of late, and, getting in a tight place-debts, you know, and one thing and another-I let my best horse go at a sacrifice the other day. Father likes to ride him, and he's going to raise sand about it.

Oh, I couldn't stand it, and so I came away. It will blow over, you know, but it will do so quicker if I'm here and he's there. Besides, he is always nagging me about having no profession or regular business, and if I see a fair opening down here, I'm really going to work."

"You'll never do it in this world." Sively laughed, and his dark eyes flashed merrily as he pulled at his well-trained mustache. "You can no more do that sort of thing than a cat-fish can hop about in a bird-cage.

In an office or bank you'd simply pine away and die. Your ancestors lived in the open air, with other people to work for them, and you are simply too near that period to do otherwise. I know, my boy, because I've tried to work. If I didn't have private interests that pin me down to a sort of routine, I'd be as helpless as you are."

"You are right, I reckon." Langdon reached out to the copper bowl on the table and took a cigar. "I know, somehow, that the few business openings I have heard of now and then have simply sickened me. When I get as much city life as is good for me down here, I like to run back to the mountains. Up there I can take my pipe and gun and dog and-"

"And enjoy life right; you bet you can," Sively said, enthusiastically.

"Well, after all, it's six of one and half a dozen of the other. My life isn't all it's cracked up to be by men who say they are yearning for it.

Between you and me, I feel like a defunct something or other when I hear these thoroughly up-to-date chaps talking at the club about their big enterprises which they are making go by the very skin of their teeth.

Why, I know one fellow under thirty who has got every electric car-line in the city tied to the tips of his fingers. I know another who is about to get Northern backing for a new railroad from here to Asheville, which he started on nothing but a sc.r.a.p of club writing-paper one afternoon over a bottle of beer. Then there is that darned chap from up your way, Luke King. He's a corker. He had little education, I am told, and sprang from the lowest cracker stock, but he's the sensation of the hour down here."

"He's doing well, then," Langdon said, a touch of anger in his tone as he recalled Virginia's reference to King on their last meeting.

"Well? You'd think so. Half the capitalists in Atlanta are daft about him. They call him a great political, financial, and moral force, with a brain as big as Abraham Lincoln's. I was an idiot. I had a chance to get in on the ground-floor when that paper of his started, but I was wise-I was knowing. When I heard the manager of the thing was the son of one of your father's old tenants, I pulled down one corner of my eye and turned him over to my financial rivals. You bet I see my mistake now. The stock is worth two for one, and not a sc.r.a.p on the market at that. Do you know what the directors did the other day? When folks do it for you or me we will feel flattered. They insured his life for one hundred thousand dollars, because if he were to die the enterprise wouldn't have a leg to stand on. You see, it's all in his big brain. I suppose you know something about his boyhood?"

"Oh yes," Langdon said, testily; "we were near the same age, and met now and then, but, you know, at that time our house was so full of visitors that I had little chance to see much of people in the neighborhood, and then he went West."

"Ah, yes," said Sively, "and that's where his boom started. They are circulating some odd stories on him down here, but I take them all with a grain of salt. They say he sold out his Western interests for a good sum and gave every red cent of it to his poor old mother and step-father."

"That's a fact," said Langdon. "I happen to know that it is absolutely true. When he got back he found his folks in a pretty bad shape, and he bought a good farm for them."

"Well, I call that a brave thing," said the older man-"a thing I couldn't do to save my neck from the halter. No wonder his editorials have stirred up the reading public; he means what he says. He's the most conspicuous man in Atlanta to-day. But, say, you want to go to your room, and I'm keeping you. Go in and make yourself comfortable. I may not get to see much of you for two or three days. I have to run out of town with some men from Boston who are with me in a deal for some coal and iron land, but I'll see you when I return."

"Oh, I can get along all right, thanks," Langdon said, as Pomp, Sively's negro man-servant, came for his bag in obedience to his master's ring.

Three days later, on his return to town from a trip to the country, Sively, not seeing anything of his guest, asked Pomp where he was.