His eyes, with their peculiar trick of solubility in his color scheme, seemed all tan.

“I’ll go,” he said, looking slim and Southern, his imperturbability ever so slightly unfrocked—­“I’ll go, but you’re making a mistake, Hattie.”

Fear kept clanging in her.  Fire bells of it.

“Oh, but that’s like you, Morton!  Threats!  But, thank God, nothing you can do can harm me any more.”

“I reckon she’s considerable over sixteen now.  Let’s see—­”

Fire bells.  Fire bells.

“Come out with what you want, Morton, like a man!  You’re feeling for something.  Money?  Now that your mother is dead and her fortune squandered, you’ve come to harass me?  That’s it!  I know you, like a person who has been disfigured for life by burns knows fire.  Well, I won’t pay!”

“Pay?  Why, Hattie—­I want you—­back—­”

She could have cried because, as she sat there blackly, she was sick with his lie.

“I’d save a dog from you.”

“Then save—­her—­from me.”

The terrible had happened so quietly.  Morton had not raised his voice; scarcely his lips.

She closed the door then and sat down once more, but that which had crouched out of their talk was unleashed now.

“That’s just exactly what I intend to do.”

“How?”

“By saving her sight or sound of you.”

“You can’t, Hattie.”

“Why?”

“I’ve come back.”  There was a curve to his words that hooked into her heart like forceps about a block of ice.  But she outstared him, holding her lips in the center of the comedy rim so that he could see how firm their bite.

“Not to me.”

“To her, then.”

“Even you wouldn’t be low enough to let her know—­”

“Know what?”

“Facts.”

“You mean she doesn’t know?”

“Know!  Know you for what you are and for what you made of me?  I’ve kept it something decent for her.  Just the separation of husband and wife—­who couldn’t agree.  Incompatibility.  I have not told her—­” And suddenly could have rammed her teeth into the tongue that had betrayed her.  Simultaneously with the leap of light into his eyes came the leap of her error into her consciousness.

“Oh,” he said, and smiled, a slow smile that widened as leisurely as sorghum in the pouring.

“You made me tell you that!  You came here for that.  To find out!”

“Nothin’ the sort, Hattie.  You only verified what I kinda suspected.  Naturally, you’ve kept it from her.  Admire you for it.”

“But I lied!  See!  I know your tricks.  She does know you for what you are and what you made of me.  She knows everything.  Now what are you going to do?  She knows!  I lied!  I—­” then stopped, at the curve his lips were taking and at consciousness of the pitiableness of her device.

“Morton,” she said, her hands opening into her lap into pads of great pink helplessness, “you wouldn’t tell her—­on me!  You’re not that low!”