He preached his sermon mechanically, with no sense of what he was reading, never lifting his eyes from his manuscript. The dilapidated pair—they had looked extraordinarily dilapidated as they stood there, guilty and caught, in the unsparing light of Sunday morning—floated constantly before him, and made it impossible for him to attend to a word he was saying.
What was he to do next? How could he ever face Virginia, and answer her anxious, loving questions about her mother’s safety? It must be kept from her, the appalling, the simply unutterable truth; at all costs it must be kept from her in her present condition, or it well might kill her. He felt he must tell his mother, for he could not bear this burden alone, but no one else must ever know what he knew. It would be the first secret between him and Virginia, and what a secret!
His thoughts whirled this way and that, anywhere but where he was, while his lips read out what he had written in those days last week of innocent peace, that now seemed so far away, about Love. Love! What sins, thought Stephen, were committed in its name. Incredible as it was, almost impossible to imagine at their different ages, and shocking to every feeling of decency and propriety, the word had probably frequented the conversations of those two.
He shuddered away. There were some things one simply could not think of. And yet he did think of them; they haunted him. ‘We broke down,’ she had said. Persons in her position always said that. He was man of the world enough to know what that meant. And then their faces,—their startled, guilty faces, when they found him so unexpectedly confronting them.
‘Love,’ read out Stephen from his manuscript, quoting part of his text and with mechanically uplifted hand and emphasis impressing it on his congregation, ‘thinketh no evil....’
After the service he went straight back to Hertford Street. Useless to flinch from his duty. His first impulse that morning, and he had followed it, was to remove himself at once from contact with his mother-in-law. But he was a priest; he was her nearest living male relative; he was bound to do something.
He went straight back to Hertford Street, and found her sitting in the dining-room quietly eating mutton.
It had always seemed grievous to Stephen, and deeply to be regretted, that no traces of sin should be physically visible on the persons of the sinners, that a little washing and tidying should be enough to make them indistinguishable from those who had not sinned. Here was this one, looking much the same as usual, very like any other respectable quiet lady at her Sunday luncheon, eating mutton as though nothing had happened. At such a crisis, he felt, at such an overwhelming moment of all their lives, of his, of hers, of his dear love’s, whitely unconscious at home, whatever his mother-in-law did it ought anyhow not to have been that.
She looked up when he came in, walking in unannounced, putting Mrs. Mitcham aside when she tried to open the door for him.
‘I’m glad you’ve come back, Stephen,’ she said, leaning forward and pushing out the chair on her right hand for him to sit on—as though he would dream of sitting!—‘I want to tell you what happened.’