But I'd got off the road meantime, and had to find it again, and whenever I got back to the track and was pointed for his house, it all seemed to come back on me and set me off agin.

When that had happened three times, I turned round and started for home." "And do you mean to say," said the lady, with a discordant laugh, "that you believe, because YOU didn't go there and break the news, that nobody else will?
That he won't hear of it from the first man he meets ?" "He don't meet any one up where he lives, and only Briggs and myself know it, and I'll see that Briggs don't tell.

But it was mighty queer this whole thing comin' upon me suddenly,--wasn't it ?" "Very queer," replied the lady; "for"-- with the same metallic laugh--"you don't seem to be given to this kind of weakness with your own family." If there was any doubt as to the sarcastic suggestion of her voice, there certainly could be none in the wicked glitter of her eyes fixed upon his face under her shading hand.

But haply he seemed unconscious of both, and even accepted her statement without an ulterior significance.
"Yes," he said, communingly, to the glaring embers of the hearth, "it must have been a special revelation." There was something so fatuous and one-idea'd in his attitude and expression, so monstrously inconsistent and inadequate to what was going on around him, and so hopelessly stupid--if a mere simulation--that the angry suspicion that he was acting a part slowly faded from her eyes, and a hysterical smile began to twitch her set lips.

She still gazed at him.