Pauline stared at him. "Father!" she exclaimed.
He put his arm round her and drew her gently to him.
"I know the idea is repellent," he said, as if he were trying to persuade a child. "But it's right, Pauline. There are cases in which not to divorce would be a sin. I hope my daughter sees that this is one."
"I don't understand," she said confusedly. "I thought you and mother believed divorce was dreadful—no matter what might happen."
"We did, Pauline. But we—that is, I—had never had it brought home. A hint of this story was published just after you came last year. I thought it false, but it set me to thinking. 'If your daughter's husband had turned out to be as you once thought him, would it be right for her to live on with him? To live a lie, to pretend to keep her vows to love and honor him? Would it be right to condemn Gardiner to be poisoned by such a father?' And at last I saw the truth, and your mother agreed with me. We had been too narrow. We had been laying down our own notions as God's great justice."
Pauline drew away from her father so that she could look at him. And at last she saw into his heart. "If I had only known," she said, and sat numb and stunned.
"When you were coming home from college," her father went on, "your mother and I talked over what we should do. John had just confessed your secret marriage—"
"You knew that!"
"Yes, and we understood, Polly. You were so young—so headstrong—and you couldn't appreciate our reasons."
Pauline's brain was reeling.