“Elnora,” he said at last, “if it hadn’t been for one thing I’d have tried to take legal steps to make you ours when you were three years old.  Maggie said then it wasn’t any use, but I’ve always held on.  You see, I was the first man there, honey, and there are things you see, that you can’t ever make anybody else understand.  She loved him Elnora, she just made an idol of him.  There was that oozy green hole, with the thick scum broke, and two or three big bubbles slowly rising that were the breath of his body.  There she was in spasms of agony, and beside her the great heavy log she’d tried to throw him.  I can’t ever forgive her for turning against you, and spoiling your childhood as she has, but I couldn’t forgive anybody else for abusing her.  Maggie has got no mercy on her, but Maggie didn’t see what I did, and I’ve never tried to make it very clear to her.  It’s been a little too plain for me ever since.  Whenever I look at your mother’s face, I see what she saw, so I hold my tongue and say, in my heart, ‘Give her a mite more time.’  Some day it will come.  She does love you, Elnora.  Everybody does, honey.  It’s just that she’s feeling so much, she can’t express herself.  You be a patient girl and wait a little longer.  After all, she’s your mother, and you’re all she’s got, but a memory, and it might do her good to let her know that she was fooled in that.”

“It would kill her!” cried the girl swiftly.  “Uncle Wesley, it would kill her!  What do you mean?”

“Nothing,” said Wesley Sinton soothingly.  “Nothing, honey.  That was just one of them fool things a man says, when he is trying his best to be wise.  You see, she loved him mightily, and they’d been married only a year, and what she was loving was what she thought he was.  She hadn’t really got acquainted with the man yet.  If it had been even one more year, she could have borne it, and you’d have got justice.  Having been a teacher she was better educated and smarter than the rest of us, and so she was more sensitive like.  She can’t understand she was loving a dream.  So I say it might do her good if somebody that knew, could tell her, but I swear to gracious, I never could.  I’ve heard her out at the edge of that quagmire calling in them wild spells of hers off and on for the last sixteen years, and imploring the swamp to give him back to her, and I’ve got out of bed when I was pretty tired, and come down to see she didn’t go in herself, or harm you.  What she feels is too deep for me.  I’ve got to respectin’ her grief, and I can’t get over it.  Go home and tell your ma, honey, and ask her nice and kind to help you.  If she won’t, then you got to swallow that little lump of pride in your neck, and come to Aunt Maggie, like you been a-coming all your life.”

“I’ll ask mother, but I can’t take your money, Uncle Wesley, indeed I can’t.  I’ll wait a year, and earn some, and enter next year.”