harlotte
caught it and plumped it at me.

"You remember yourself how disgusted the authorities were when he
trotted about like a homeless dog and insisted on being arrested for a
crime they knew he didn't commit. Poor old Tenney! they said, any man
might be crazed, losing his wife and child in one week. They were very
gentle with him. They told him if he hung round talking much longer he'd
be late for his planting. Of course the doctor did set the pace. He'd
told, everywhere he went, how Tira had sent for him at once, and how she
had said she had, in that hideous country phrase, 'overlaid' the child.
One interesting psychological part of it has persisted to this day: the
effect Tira had on the doctor, his entire belief in her simple statement
which she was never asked to swear to. (You remember there was no
inquest.) He never, he said, was so sorry for a woman in his life. He
seems to have been so determined to prove her a tragic figure that he
wouldn't for a moment have the disaster lightened by denying her that
last misfortune of having done it herself. Lots of these things I
haven't told you, they're so grim and, to me now, so wearing. They've
got on all our nerves like the devil, and I fancy even the Wake Hill
natives are pretty well fed up with 'em. At first they couldn't get
enough. When Tenney couldn't get the law to believe in him so far as to
indict him, the embattled farmers took it on themselves to cross-examine
him, not because they thought for a minute he was guilty, but because
they itched to hear him say so: drama, don't you see? And he never
wavered in asserting he did it: only when they asked him how, he just
stared, and once told a particularly smart Alec, he guessed it was a
man's own business how he killed his own child. And he stayed up in the
hut, just as he was doing when you went away, and night after night I
had to stay with him. Stuck to me like a burr and wore me threadbare
asking if he was forgiven, and if that didn't mean he was whiter than
snow. I tell you, Dick, it was all so involved that I believe, although
he used the set phrases about the Lord Jesus Christ, he really believed
it was I that had forgiven him. He used to ask me to tell God to do it
for my sake; and I remembered Old Crow and how he played up to Billy
Jones, and, if you'll believe it, I _did_ ask God (though not for my
sake!), and horrible as it is, grotesque as it is (no, by George, it
isn't grotesque to speak to a man in