"Dear Aunt, come to bed."
"I was his, his consecrate—body and soul, and I gave myself to another."
"Oh, Aunt Rosamond," cried the girl, with a sudden upspringing of tears, as a glimmering realisation of the other's anguished mind broke, upon her. "He is a happy spirit. He understands."
"It is you who cannot understand," angrily answered the woman. "Even in life he wrote: 'my flesh rebels against the thought.' It was the worst sting of death to him. And I never knew. Now I have lost him, I am lost."
Baby took the nerveless hands in hers, and chafed them while her tears rolled slowly.
"Pray to God, dearest," she whispered. "He will help you."
Rosamond drew away her hand with a great cry.
"God? There is no God!"
"Oh, Aunt!"
"Yes—there is, there is—a God of unsparing justice. Only a God could be so merciless and so just. It is just, it is just. I have sinned irremediably. I am punished for ever. What can you—you child, you child, what can you know of my sin?"