moments when she realized that she had been cruelly driven by
circumstances into a situation that offered no escape.

"Mas'r Tom he say he won't come in to supper, Missy; he 'low he's
powerful busy, gittin' ready to go to Memphis in the mo'ning," explained
Steve, as he followed Betty into the dining-room.

His mistress nodded indifferently as she seated herself at the table;
she was glad to be alone just then; she was in no mood to carry on the
usual sluggish conversation with Tom; her own thoughts absorbed her more
and more they became terrifying things to her.

She ate her supper with big Steve standing behind her chair and little
Steve balancing himself first on one foot and then on the other near the
door. Little Steve's head was on a level with the chair rail and but
for the rolling whites of his eyes he was no more than a black shadow
against the walnut wainscoting; he formed the connecting link between
the dining-room and the remote kitchen. Betty suspected that most of the
platters journeyed down the long corridor deftly perched on top of his
woolly head. She frequently detected him with greasy or sticky fingers,
which while it argued a serious breach of trust also served to indicate
his favorite dishes. These two servitors were aware that their mistress
was laboring under some unusual stress of emotion. In its presence big
Steven, who, with the slightest encouragement, became a medium through
which the odds and ends of plantation gossip reached Betty's ears, held
himself to silence; while little Steve ceased to shift his weight from
foot to foot, the very dearth of speech fixed his attention.

The long French windows, their curtains drawn, stood open. All day a hot
September sun had beaten upon the earth, but with the fall of twilight
a soft wind had sprung up and the candles in their sconces flared at
its touch. It came out of wide solitudes laden with the familiar night
sounds. It gave Betty a sense of vast unused spaces, of Belle Plain
clinging on the edge of an engulfing wilderness, of her own loneliness.
She needed Charley as much as he seemed to think he needed her. The life
she had been living had become suddenly impossible of continuance; that
it had ever been possible was because of Charley; she knew this now as
she had never known it before.

Her thoughts dealt with the past. In her one great grief, her mother's
death, it had been Charley who had sustained and comforted her. She was
conscious of