“You are sudden and fierce,” she rejoined coldly.  “What do you wish me to say?  What I did not finish—­that southerners love altogether or—­hate altogether?”

His face became like stone.  At last, scarce above a whisper, he said:  “Am I to understand that you hate me, that nothing can wipe it out—­no repentance and no remorse?  You never gave me a chance for a word of explanation or excuse.  You refused to see me.  You returned my letter unopened.  But had you asked her—­the woman—­the whole truth”—­

“If it could make any difference, I will ask her to-morrow.”

He did not understand.  He thought she was speaking ironically.

“You are harder than you know,” he said heavily.  “But I will speak.  It is for the last time.  Will you hear me?”

“I do not wish to, but I will not go.”

“I had met her five years before there was anything between you and me.  She accepted the situation when she understood that I would not marry her.  The child was born.  Time went on.  I loved you.  I told her.  She agreed to go away to England:  I gave her money.  The day you found us together was to have been the last that I should see of her.  The luck was against me.  It always has been in things that I cared for.  You sent a man to kill me”—­

“No, no.  I did not send any one.  I might have killed you—­or her—­had I been anything more than a child, but I sent no one.  You believe that, do you not?”

For the first time since they had begun to speak she showed a little excitement, but immediately was cold and reserved again.

“I have always believed you,” he said again.  “The man who is your husband came to kill me”—­

“He went to fight you,” she said, looking at him more intently than she had yet done.

A sardonic smile played for a moment at his lips.  He seemed about to speak through it.  Presently, however, his eyes half closed as with a sudden thought he did not return her gaze, but looked down to where the graves of monks and abbots, and sinners maybe, were as steps upon the river bank.

“What does it matter?” he thought.  “She hates me.”  But he said aloud:  “Then, as you say, he came to fight me.  I hear that he is dead,” he added in a tone still more softened.  He had not the heart to meet her scorn with scorn.  As he said, it didn’t matter if she hated him.  It would be worth while remembering, when he had gone, that he had been gentle with her and had spared her the shame of knowing that she had married not only a selfish brute, but a coward and a would be assassin as well.  He had only heard rumors of her life since he had last seen her, twelve years before, but he knew enough to be sure that she was aware of Fairfax Detlor’s true character.  She had known less still of his life, for since her marriage she had never set foot in Louisiana, and her mother, while she lived, never mentioned his name or told her more than that the Telford plantation had been sold for a song.  When Hagar had told him that Detlor was dead, a wild kind of hope had leaped up in him that perhaps she might care for him still and forgive him when he had told all.  These last few minutes had robbed him of that hope.  He did not quarrel with the act The game was lost long ago, and it was foolish to have dreamed for an instant that the record could be reversed.