t does not hurt me to talk, but I want time.... I will tell you
... I must tell you.... I know it.... It was not his own doing.... He
was set on to do it by a devil that possessed him.... There are devils
loose among the blacks...."

The pulse in the hand Ruth held was easy to find. Yes, that _was_ fever!
Ruth left her to speak with Elizabeth, and the hand went over to its
fellow, in Granny Marrable's.

"Phoebe, dearest, that is so--and in those days there were a many
blacks. But they were fewer and fewer after that, and none in our part
when we came away, my son and I.... Phoebe!"

"What, dearest?"

"You must say nothing of _him_ to Ruth. He was her brother."

"Say nothing of him to Ruth--why not?" She had lost sight of her
adventure with the convict, and did not identify him. She may have
fancied some other son accompanied her sister home.

"Yes--yes--nothing to _her_! He is not fit to speak of--not fit to think
of.... Do not ask about him. Forget him! I do not know if he be alive or
dead."

Then an image of the convict, or madman, flashed across Phoebe's mind.
She dared not talk of him now, with that wild light and hectic flush in
her sister's face; it would only make bad worse. But a recollection of
her first association of him with the maniac in the Gadarene tombs was
quick on the heels of this image, and prompted her to say:--"Had no evil
spirit power over _him_, then, as well as his father?"

The wild expression on old Maisie's face died down, and gave place to
one that was peace itself by comparison. "I see it all now," said she.
"Yes--you are right! It was after his father's death he became so
wicked." It was the devil that possessed his father, driven out to seek
a home, and finding it in the son. That was apparently what her words
implied, but there was too much of delirium in her speech and seeming to
justify their being taken as expressing a serious thought.

Old Phoebe sat beside her, trying now and again with quiet voice and
manner to soothe and hush away the terrible memories of the audacious
deception to which each owed a lifelong loss of the other. But when
fever seizes on the blood, it will not relax its hold for words.

One effect of this was good, in a sense. It _is_ true, as the poet said,
that one fire burns out another's burning--or at any rate that one pain
is deadened by another anguish--and it was a Godsend to Granny Marrable
and Ruth Thrale that an acupression of immediate anxiety