"Ah!" she interposed with a catch of the breath. "Do not curse her.
She was dead, poor thing!"
"I tell you that I cursed her as I cursed myself. . . . Yes, we both deserved to die. She died with her teeth in my flesh—the flesh whose desire was all we ever had in common."
"Yes . . . I knew."
"Have you the coat I wore?"
"It is folded away. Some boxes of clothes were saved from the house, and I laid it away in one of them."
"Her teeth must have torn it?"
"Yes." Ruth would have moved away in sheer heart-sickness. Why would he persist in talking thus?
"I shall always keep that coat. If ever I am tempted to forget the mercy of God, the rent in that coat shall remind me."
She wanted to cry aloud, "Oh, cease, cease!" This new pietism of his revolted her almost to physical sickness. She recognised in it the selfishness she had too fatally learned to detect in all pietism. "At least he had owed enough to his poor little fellow-sinner to spare a thought of pity!" . . . But a miserable restraint held her tongue as he went on—
"Yes, Ruth. God showed Himself to me in that hour; showed me, too, all the evil of my past life. I had no hope to live; but I vowed to Him then, if I lived, to live as one reformed."