“I—I did it, Mildred. I was the coward that you thought me. I don’t know what insensate fear came over me and took possession of me utterly, but it was nothing to the fear I felt afterwards—for those two weeks—that you might suspect me of it. And when I knew you did I was mad with grief and anger at myself, and yet—it seems to me below contempt—I tried to save my miserable pride. But I have always meant that you should know at last.”
She looked at him with blank uncomprehension.
“I did it,” he repeated, doggedly, and waited for the change he thought to see upon her face. It came, but with a difference.
“You—you did it?” for the idea made its way but slowly to her mind. “Then”—with a rush of feeling that she hardly understood, and an impetuous, tender gesture—“then let me comfort you.”
It was the voice of the woman who had loved him, and not of any Sister of Charity, however gracious, that he heard again, but he turned sharply away.
“God forbid,” he said, and she shrank from the misery in his voice; “God forbid that even you should take away my punishment. Don’t you see? It is all the comfort I dare have, to go where there is danger and to face death when I can, till the day comes when I am not afraid, for I am a coward yet.”
She stretched her hands out toward him blindly. I am afraid that she forgot just then all the boasted sweetness of her present life, her years of training, and her coming postulancy at St. Margaret’s, as well as the heinousness of his offence. She forgot everything, save that this was Neil, and that he suffered.
But all that she, being a woman and merciful, forgot, he, being a man and something more than just, remembered.
“Good-by, and God be with you,” he said.
“Neil!” she cried. “Neil!”