ere's more
back of this than Charley would want you to know. I reckon he's got
his enemies; some one's had a grudge against him and taken this way
to settle it." The planter's tone and manner were charged with an
unpleasant significance.

"I don't like your hints, Tom," said Betty. Her heightened color and the
light in her eyes warned Tom that he had said enough. In some haste he
finished his second cup of tea, a beverage which he despised, and after
a desultory remark or two, withdrew to his office.

Betty went up-stairs to her own room, where she tried to finish a letter
she had begun the day before to Judith Ferris, but she was in no mood
for this. She was owning to a sense of utter depression and she had been
at home less than a month. Struggle as she might against the feeling,
it was borne in upon her that she was wretchedly lonely. She had seated
herself by an open window. Now, resting her elbows on the ledge and with
her chin between her palms, she gazed off into the still night. A mile
distant, on what was called "Shanty Hill," were the quarters of the
slaves. The only lights she saw were there, the only sounds she heard
reached her across the intervening fields. This was her world. A
half-savage world with its uncouth army of black dependents.

Tom's words still rankled. Betty's temper flared up belligerently as she
recalled them. He had evidently meant to insinuate that Charley had lied
outright when he told her the motive for the attack, and he had followed
it up by that covert slur on his character. Charley's devotion was the
thing that redeemed the dull monotony of existence. She became suddenly
humble and tenderly penitent in her mood toward him; he loved her much
better than she deserved, and she suspected that her own attitude had
been habitually ungenerous and selfish. She had accepted all and yielded
nothing. She wondered gravely why it was she did not love him; she was
fond of him--she was very, very fond of him; she wondered if after all,
as he said, this were not the beginning of love, the beginning of that
deeper feeling which she was not sure she understood, not sure she
should ever experience.

The thought of Charley's unwavering affection gave her a great sense of
peace; it was something to have inspired such devotion, she could
never be quite desperate while she had him. She must try to make him
understand how possible an ideal friendship was between them, how
utterly impossible anything el