This, as he remembered later, was the turning-point in her mood.  In imagination he saw her try it and fail; saw her lithe, shapely beauty lying broken and mangled at the cliff’s foot; and in three bounds he had her fast locked in his restraining arms.  She strove with him at first, like a wrestling boy, laughing and taunting him with being afraid for himself.  Then—­

Tom Gordon, clean-hearted as yet, did not know precisely what happened.  Suddenly she stopped struggling and lay panting in his arms, and quite as suddenly he released her.

“Nan!” he said, in a swiftly submerging wave of tenderness, “I didn’t go to hurt you!”

She sank down on a stone at his feet and covered her face with her hands.  But she was up again and turning from him with eyes downcast before he could comfort her.

“I ain’t hurt none,” she said gravely.  And then:  “I reckon we’d better be gettin’ them berries.  It looks like it might shower some; and paw’ll kill me if I ain’t home time to get his supper.”

Here was an end of the playtime, and Tom helped industriously with the berry-picking, wondering the while why she kept her face turned from him, and why his brain was in such a turmoil, and why his hands shook so if they happened to touch hers in reaching for the piggin.

But this new mood of hers was more unapproachable than the other; and it was not until the piggin was filled and they had begun to retrace their steps together through the fragrant wood, that she let him see her eyes again, and told him soberly of her troubles:  how she was fifteen and could neither read nor write; how the workmen’s children in Gordonia hooted at her and called her a mountain cracker when she went down to buy meal or to fill the molasses jug; and, lastly, how, since her mother had died, her father had worked little and drunk much, till at times there was nothing to eat save the potatoes she raised in the little patch back of the cabin, and the berries she picked on the mountain side.

“I hain’t never told anybody afore, and you mustn’t tell, Tom.  But times I’m scared paw ‘ll up and kill me when—­when he ain’t feelin’ just right.  He’s some good to me when he ain’t red-eyed; but that ain’t very often, nowadays.”

Tom’s heart swelled within him; and this time it was not the heart of the Pharisee.  There is no lure known to the man part of the race that is half so potent as the tale of a woman in trouble.

“Does—­does he beat you, Nan?” he asked; and there was wrathful horror in his voice.

For answer she bent her head and parted the thick black locks over a long scar.

“That’s where he give me one with the skillet, a year come Christmas.  And this,”—­opening her frock to show him a black-and-blue bruise on her breast,—­“is what I got only day afore yisterday.”

Tom was burning with indignant compassion, and bursting because he could think of no adequate way of expressing it.  In all his fifteen years no one had ever leaned on him before, and the sense of protectorship over this abused one budded and bloomed like a juggler’s rose.