h the
berry-picking, wondering the while why she kept her face turned from
him, and why his brain was in such a turmoil, and why his hands shook so
if they happened to touch hers in reaching for the piggin.

But this new mood of hers was more unapproachable than the other; and it
was not until the piggin was filled and they had begun to retrace their
steps together through the fragrant wood, that she let him see her eyes
again, and told him soberly of her troubles: how she was fifteen and
could neither read nor write; how the workmen's children in Gordonia
hooted at her and called her a mountain cracker when she went down to
buy meal or to fill the molasses jug; and, lastly, how, since her mother
had died, her father had worked little and drunk much, till at times
there was nothing to eat save the potatoes she raised in the little
patch back of the cabin, and the berries she picked on the mountain
side.

"I hain't never told anybody afore, and you mustn't tell, Tom. But times
I'm scared paw 'll up and kill me when--when he ain't feelin' just
right. He's some good to me when he ain't red-eyed; but that ain't very
often, nowadays."

Tom's heart swelled within him; and this time it was not the heart of
the Pharisee. There is no lure known to the man part of the race that is
half so potent as the tale of a woman in trouble.

"Does--does he beat you, Nan?" he asked; and there was wrathful horror
in his voice.

For answer she bent her head and parted the thick black locks over a
long scar.

"That's where he give me one with the skillet, a year come Christmas.
And this,"--opening her frock to show him a black-and-blue bruise on her
breast,--"is what I got only day afore yisterday."

Tom was burning with indignant compassion, and bursting because he could
think of no adequate way of expressing it. In all his fifteen years no
one had ever leaned on him before, and the sense of protectorship over
this abused one budded and bloomed like a juggler's rose.

"I wish I could take you home with me, Nan," he said simply.

There was age-old wisdom in the dark eyes when they were lifted to his.

"No, you don't," she said firmly. "Your mammy would call me a little
heathen, same as she used to; and I reckon that's what I am--I hain't
had no chanst to be anything else. And you're goin' to be a preacher,
Tom."

Why did it rouse a dull anger in his heart to be thus reminded of his
own scarce-cooled pledge made on his knees under