She pointed to the door. He turned, locked it, put the key in his pocket, and his eyes steadily met the challenge in hers. The banked, smouldering fires that flashed up must burn lower before he could plead. So they stood: he flushed, smiling, happy; she shaken by a tempest of rage that blanched her to a livid pallor and set all the glittering rings of hair quivering, as if innumerable golden serpents coiled and uncoiled around her trembling form.
In the pause he lifted the hanging ends of the knotted cord.
"Do you understand what this habit means?"
"Don't I? A holy cloak to hide every sin that makes this world a hotter hell than even God could fashion—if God were possible. You drape it over the ten commandments, blotting them out, while you sing psalms, and rob the toiling poor, and ruin young lives, and murder innocent souls. Oh, yes, to my sorrow, I understand all it means!"
"It means my consecration to celibacy when you fled from me, and I had exhausted all efforts to find you."
"Celibacy! Celibacy! I needed no nunnery to help me keep clean and pure, but you ran behind monastery walls to protect yourself from retribution at a wronged woman's hands. Coward from first to last! When I fled from you? You must indeed be possessed of the devil to dare such language to me."
"Nona, there has been some awful mistake——"
"Yes, a mistake that I was not scalped, or that a merciful bolt of lightning did not strike me dead that day—that cursed day—when first I set my eyes on your false, treacherous face! If you could only know how I hate, despise, utterly despise the bare thought, much more the horrible sight of you!"
"No wonder, since circumstances were apparently all against me at——"
"Circumstances are no shelter for honest, honorable men, if there be any left; and the hard, bitter, murderous facts of your shameful life would find you out if you dodged under the very throne of the God you blaspheme by professing!"