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when the Captain—the title was still new then, which would make it around 1919—came courting his daughter. Of course she was the kind of girl a man like him who had had his pick of women would choose when it came time to take a wife. He was twenty-eight, she twenty—time both of them were married. Old Man Griffin watched them for six months, as the whole town did, while they went for drives in the Captain’s butter-colored Apperson, or sat behind the honeysuckle trellis on the front porch on warm Sunday afternoons. Then he began expecting the Captain to come for a talk with him. He did not believe, anymore than the rest of us did, those who said she was keeping him waiting for an answer. There were just too many good-looking girls ready to do what his man Chauncey was always declaring his readiness to do: wash dat man’s feet an drink de water! But if Miss Hannah Griffin was flattered at being chosen the bride of the man with such a notorious long list of conquests, she certainly never showed it. How could her father, or anyone else, guess that she had never even heard the stories about him? That if she had she would have refused ever to see him again?
    Her father told her, certain that this would set things right, that her husband was no different from any other man. He did not know his daughter. She was not so innocent that she did not know other men were like that. But her husband she had expected to be the one man who was different. He was to have kept himself for her. Her father, she realized, was not ashamed to include himself in that general ruck of men. Stunned, she returned to Wade, too sickened even to accuse him.
    Yet she forgave him, hardly knowing she was doing it, when shortly after she discovered that she was pregnant.
    Wade wanted a boy to make a hunter of. She wanted a boy too. It was a man’s world.
    In her sixth month she received an anonymous letter. It said that all the town knew her husband was deceiving her—“two-timing” was the low way the writer had put it—and named the woman, one of her friends. It was especially pitiful, said the letter, in view of her present condition. At first, despite what she knew now of his past, she refused to believe it. Then she recalled looks, words, silences that took on significance. She remembered excuses of his for late nights out, a weekend hunting party from which he, the best hunter in the county, had returned empty-handed. She had invited the couple often to her house, thinking Wade was fond of the husband. What a fool that must have made her in their eyes, in the eyes of the town!
    This time she went to her mother. But her father, having heard the rumors and sensing something afoot, burst in on them. He dismissed the letter, swore that the writer was some disappointed admirer of Wade’s, cursed the town gossips, and ended by calling her a bad wife with no trust in her man.
    She could see he did not want a young divorcée with an infant on his hands.
    She prayed that she might miscarry.
    But as her time neared, Wade’s part in the child came to seem less and less …
    â€¦ Until now that white stone in the middle, as even the stranger who brought her home for good in that padded hearse remarked, makes no more mention of any father than her own red stone does of a husband, but reads:
    Theron
    ONLY CHILD OF HANNAH HUNNICUTT
    or, as some have read it, Child of Hannah Hunnicutt Only—as if hers had been the world’s second immaculate conception, or as if she had reproduced by dividing herself in half—which in fact does pretty well state the case.
    â€œHe is my husband,” she had said, “and I took him for better or worse. It is his weakness. His weakness and my cross. I suppose I ought to consider myself lucky it’s my only one. He vowed to forsake all others and he has broken his vow a dozen times to my knowledge, which means a hundred times more that I never knew of, no doubt, and a