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Nessie removed her hands and looked at her lover with a ghastly face.

"Oh, Abner, if just one man at the other end of the county knows it, he'll tell ever'body—ever'body. . . ." She shook her head with renewed tears silently running down her cheeks.

This was another truth which Abner knew only too well. The more appalling the injury which the hill folk could inflict on a woman, the more eagerly they bandied such defamation from tongue to tongue. But this injury was inflicted impersonally. It was merely interesting human gossip, and obscene—to their liking. It palliated their own repressions. Out of all the endless tongues that would wag perhaps not a dozen would realize that a woman's life was withering beneath their attacks. They had not imagination enough for that.

After a long pause, Abner could find nothing better than to repeat, "Well, we're goin' to move, an' that's somethin'."

"Are you going too?" she asked lifelessly.

"Why—yes, I guess so."

At the moment this seemed to make little difference to either of them.

"When?"

"Day after t'morrow."

The girl looked at Abner with exhausted eyes.

"Well—I don't know what I'll do. . . . You may go now—to the garage, wherever you want to go. You've been in a fidget to get away ever sence you come in. . . . I don't guess I ort to have kep' you."

She stopped speaking, looking at Abner as a soldier might look upon a battlefield which he has lost. Questions floated painfully before her mind, "if she had done this . . . or that . . . or the other. . . ." But, of course, the profound mistake back of it all was having given herself through impulse, tenderness, passion, and love. She had profoundly transgressed the code of village morals; that is to say, she had placed herself in the position of a vic-