on and let me alone. Yes--yes--yes--it is
better for you to go to Watauga and leave me here."

Ever since her brother-in-law opened the door of the sitting room and
announced to the family Gray Stoddard's disappearance, Lydia Sessions
had been, as it were, a woman at war with herself. Her first impulse was
of decorum--to jerk her skirts about her in seemly fashion and be
certain that no smirch adhered to them. Then she began to wonder if she
could find Shade Buckheath, and discover from him the truth of the
matter. Whenever she would have made a movement toward this, she winced
away from what she knew he would say to her. She flinched even from
finding out that her fears were well grounded. As matters began to wear
a more serious face, she debated now and again telling her
brother-in-law of her suspicions that Buckheath had a grudge against
Stoddard. But if she said this, how account for the knowledge? How
explain to Jerome why she had denied seeing Stoddard Friday morning?
Jerome was so terribly practical--he would ask such searching questions.

Back of it all there was truly much remorse, and terrible anxiety for
Stoddard himself; but this was continually swallowed up in her concern
for her own welfare, her own good name. Always, after she had agonized
so much, there would come with a revulsion--a gust of anger. Stoddard
had never cared for her, he had been cruel in his attitude of kindness.
Let him take what followed.

Cottonville was a town distraught, and the Hardwick servants had seized
the occasion to run out for a bit of delectable gossip in which the
least of the horrors included Gray Stoddard's murdered and mutilated
body washed down in some mountain stream to the sight of his friends.

Johnnie was too urgent to long delay. Getting no answer at the side
door, she pushed it open and ventured through silent room after room
until she came to the stairway, and so on up to Miss Sessions's bedroom
door. She had been there before, and fearing to alarm by knocking, she
finally called out in what she tried to make a normal, reassuring tone.

"It's only me--Johnnie Consadine--Miss Lydia."

The answer was a hasty, muffled outcry. Somebody who had been kneeling
by the bed on the further side of the room sprang up and came forward,
showing a face so disfigured by tears and anxiety, by loss of sleep and
lack of food, as to be scarcely recognizable. That ravaged visage told
plainly the battle-ground that Lydia Sessions