She moaned and moaned; then seemed to listen.
“Too late?”
My arms were held down in anguish, to entreat this dimming phantom as it fell from me.
“O! if you had but said it a year, a month, a week ago! Useless now. Why have you hated me so?”
“Not hated—no.”
“What then? Was it love forbade that word to pass my lips, or shame? It is not like a woman to make her child the scapegoat of her sin. Or perhaps it was only that you hated to be reminded through that spoken word of a falsehood to which its utterance would have seemed a perpetual rebuke? I was the pledge to you of nothing but the lie on which you had bartered—yes, I use the term to you—on which you had bartered away your soul?”
She shivered and sighed most miserably.
“Kill me with your scorn,” she muttered. “I have deserved it.”
“Did you not hate me?” I cried, in great emotion. “Do you not hate me now?”
“I feared you,” she said low. “I always feared you from the first. I think you have shown me why. You seemed strange—a thing I had no part in. I never felt like a mother to you—God knows I could not help it. It seemed hard I should be denied redemption for one so strange to me.”