"I see. You thought it was his treatment of me he meant."
"Yes. And then you told me once that if he ever tried to take the child—"
"That I should kill him. I remember it. It was in the days when I was full of words.... And you believed I did it!"
"As God hears me, I did. Margaret, you can never know what that struggle was. It racked me. His blood cried to me day and night—as I watched it ebb away, and as I stood beside him in the silent house that I thought you had desolated. I prayed that vengeance might fall on you for this thing. As for me, I was bound,—bound by his dying wish and his dying declaration. Who would believe me if I charged you with the crime? And even if proof were not lacking how could I bring you to justice when with his latest breath he begged that I would spare you? At last I remembered the words, 'Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord.' I believe in that. God's vengeance does not always come swiftly—but it comes! I believed that some day it would fall on you. And I could wait!"
She stared at him with fascinated eyes, half feeling in the tension of the moment that she was the guilty thing he thought her.
"The waiting was not long. When the will was read—the will that by the accursed law of this District had power to take your child from you and give him to me—I saw in it my opportunity. They say there is the beast in every man—the old primordial instinct to rend and kill which ages of training and leash and club have not exterminated. I do not know. Sometimes I think it may be true. What I do know is that I came into this room a man, with a man's self-control, but when I found my hand upon your throat, found that my time had come, something within me that I did not know was there leaped up and fought and roared. I could not hold it down. It mastered me! And at the last it took my form and said through my lips, 'Vengeance shall be mine! I will repay!... And I will—repay—through—law!"
She shrank from him as we do in the presence of the mighty elemental forces of nature.
"It seemed to me in my distorted state of mind that this was Heaven's justice, and that I was the instrument to mete it out.... But Margaret!" He stretched out his hands toward her and then let them drop,—"it was not true. In my arrogance I had usurped the prerogative of Almighty God—and He—has—punished me!"
His voice sank lower and lower with each word.
At last she broke the silence that was stifling her, saying wonderingly and with hesitation,