“Will you tell me all about it—­about her, sometime?”

“If you are going away, why should you ask that?  If you are going to be nothing to me, in all the world, what right have you to ask that of me?  You would not have the right I’ve had in speaking to you as I have.  That was right.  It was the right of love.  I love you!  I don’t care if all the world knows it.  Let that girl there hear if she likes.  I’ve said, we belong together, and it seems truth to me, the very truth; yes, and the very right itself.  But some way, we hurt each other, don’t we?  Look at you, there, suffering.  My fault.  And I’d rather it had cost me a limb than to see you hurt that way.  It cuts my heart.  I can’t rest over it.  And you hurt me, too, I reckon, about as bad as anything can.  Maybe you hurt me more than you know.  But as to our rights to anything back of the curtain that’s before us, before your life and mine, why, I can’t begin until something else has begun.  It’s not right, unless that other is right, that I’ve told you.  We belong together in the one big way, first.  That’s the premise.  That’s the one great thing.  What difference about the rest, future or past?”

“You’ve not been much among women,” she said.

“Very little.”

“You don’t understand them.”

“I don’t reckon anybody does.”

“Jeanne told me that she heard, last night, a child crying, here in this house.”

“Could it not have been a negro child?” He smiled at her, even as he stood under inquisition.

She noticed that his face now seemed pale.  The bones of the cheeks stood out more now.  He showed more gravity.  Freed of his red fighting flush, the, flame of passion gone out of his eyes, he seemed more dignified, more of a man than had hitherto been apparent to her.

“Non! Non!” cried out Jeanne, who had benefited unnoticed to an extent undreamed hitherto in her experience in matter delicate between man and maid.  Her mistress raised a hand.  She herself had almost forgotten that Jeanne was in the room. “Non! Non!” reiterated that young person.  “Eet was no neegaire child, pas de tout, jamais de la vie!  I know those neegaire voice.  It was a voice white, Madame, Monsieur!  Apparently it wept.  Perhaps it had hunger.”

A sort of grim uncovering of his teeth was Dunwody’s smile.  He made no comment.  His face was whiter than before.

“Whose child was it?” demanded Josephine, motioning to the garments he still held in his hands.  “Hers?” He shook his head slowly.

“No.”

“Yours?”

“No.”

“Oh, well, I suppose it was some servant’s—­though the overseer, Jeanne says, lives across the fields, there.  And there would not be any negroes living here in the house, in any case?”

“No.”

“Was it—­was it—­yours?”

“I have no child.  There will never be any for me in the world—­except—­under—­” But now the flush came back into his face.  Confused, he turned, and gently laid down the faded silks across a chair back, pulling it even with the one where lay Josephine’s richer and more modern robes.  He looked at the two grimly, sadly, shook his head and walked out of the room.