‘You know all about it then?’

’No;—­I don’t know.  But I think it has been so.  I do know that John Crumb had threatened to do this thing, and I felt sure that sooner or later he would be as good as his word.  If it has been so, who is to blame him?’

Hetta as she heard the story hardly knew whether her cousin, in his manner of telling the story, was speaking of that other man, of that stranger of whom she had never heard, or of himself.  He would have made her his wife and have been good to her.  He had a home to offer her.  He was an honest man with whom she would have been safe and respected and happy!  He had looked at her while...