Elvira Carney sobbed in panting gasps.

“You’ve got tears, have you?” marvelled Mrs. Comstock.  “Mine all dried long ago.  I’ve none left to shed over my wasted life, my disfigured face and hair, my years of struggle with a man’s work, my wreck of land among the tilled fields of my neighbours, or the final knowledge that the man I so gladly would have died to save, wasn’t worth the sacrifice of a rattlesnake.  If anything yet could wring a tear from me, it would be the thought of the awful injustice I always have done my girl.  If I’d lay hand on you for anything, it would be for that.”

“Kill me if you want to,” sobbed Elvira Carney.  “I know that I deserve it, and I don’t care.”

“You are getting your killing fast enough to suit me,” said Mrs. Comstock.  “I wouldn’t touch you, any more than I would him, if I could.  Once is all any man or woman deceives me about the holiest things of life.  I wouldn’t touch you any more than I would the black plague.  I am going back to my girl.”

Mrs. Comstock turned and started swiftly through the woods, but she had gone only a few rods when she stopped, and leaning on the hoe, she stood thinking deeply.  Then she turned back.  Elvira still clung to the fence, sobbing bitterly.

“I don’t know,” said Mrs. Comstock, “but I left a wrong impression with you.  I don’t want you to think that I believe the Almighty set a cancer to burning you as a punishment for your sins.  I don’t!  I think a lot more of the Almighty.  With a whole sky-full of worlds on His hands to manage, I’m not believing that He has time to look down on ours, and pick you out of all the millions of us sinners, and set a special kind of torture to eating you.  It wouldn’t be a gentlemanly thing to do, and first of all, the Almighty is bound to be a gentleman.  I think likely a bruise and bad blood is what caused your trouble.  Anyway, I’ve got to tell you that the cleanest housekeeper I ever knew, and one of the noblest Christian women, was slowly eaten up by a cancer.  She got hers from the careless work of a poor doctor.  The Almighty is to forgive sin and heal disease, not to invent and spread it.”

She had gone only a few steps when she again turned back.

“If you will gather a lot of red clover bloom, make a tea strong as lye of it, and drink quarts, I think likely it will help you, if you are not too far gone.  Anyway, it will cool your blood and make the burning easier to bear.”

Then she swiftly went home.  Enter the lonely cabin she could not, neither could she sit outside and think.  She attacked a bed of beets and hoed until the perspiration ran from her face and body, then she began on the potatoes.  When she was too tired to take another stroke she bathed and put on dry clothing.  In securing her dress she noticed her husband’s carefully preserved clothing lining one wall.  She gathered it in an armload and carried it to the swamp.  Piece by piece she pitched into the green maw of the quagmire all those articles she had dusted carefully and fought moths from for years, and stood watching as it slowly sucked them down.  She went back to her room and gathered every scrap that had in any way belonged to Robert Comstock, excepting his gun and revolver, and threw it into the swamp.  Then for the first time she set her door wide open.