an who, come another
half hour or less, let himself drop with an audible thump into a
golden-oak rocker alongside the Widow Millsap's sewing machine.

"Ma'am," he had confessed, without preamble, as he entered her house,
she holding the door open for his passage, "I come back to you licked.
Your daughter absolutely declines even to consider the proposition I put
before her. As a plenipotentiary extraordinary I admit I'm a teetotal
failure. I return to you empty-handed--and licked."

To this she had said nothing. She had waited until he was seated; then
as she seated herself in her former place, with the lamp between them,
she asked quietly, almost listlessly, "My daughter saw you then?"

"She did, ma'am, she did. And she refused point-blank!"

"I am sorry, Judge Priest--sorry that you should have been put to so
much trouble needlessly," she said, still holding her voice at that
emotionless level. "I am sorry, sir, for your sake; but it is no more
than I expected. I let you go to her against my better judgment. I
should have known that your errand would be useless. Knowing Ellie, I
should have known better than to send you."

He snorted.

"Ma'am, when a little while ago, settin' right here, I told you I
thought I knowed a little something about human nature I boasted too
soon. Sech a thing ez this thing which has happened to-night is
brand-new in my experience. You will excuse my sayin' so, but I kin not
fathom the workin's of a mind that would--that would--" He floundered
for words in his indignation. "It is not natural, this here thing I have
just seen and heard. How your own flesh and blood could--"

"Judge Priest," she said steadily, "it is not my own flesh and blood
that you accuse. That is my consolation now. For I know the stock that
is in me. I know the stock that was in my husband. My own flesh and
blood could never treat me so."

He stared at her, his forehead twisted in a perplexed frown.

"I mean to say just this," she went on: "Ellie is not my own child. She
has not a drop of my blood or my husband's blood in her. Judge Priest, I
am about to tell you something which not another soul in this town
excepting me--now that my husband is gone--has ever known. We never had
any children, Felix and I. Always we wanted children, but none came to
us. Nearly twenty-three years ago it is now, we had for a neighbor a
young woman whose husband had deserted her--had run away with another
woman, leaving her without