"No, no. I don't mean that. I wasn't offended. Don't think I am saying this out of spite. I am not. I am only explaining. You were perfectly right, you judged me truly enough. I don't go in for being generous. I never give something for less than nothing. Naturally we both know that if I give you your locket I give you the case;—that is what you mean, isn't it?" He paused a moment, and Meg bowed her head.
"And some men, your father among them, would have let a man who had injured them go for the sake of the woman they—who asked them. I acknowledge that; but I am not of that kind. I have never even pretended to be. You have always understood that before so well," said George a little bitterly, "that you ought in fairness to understand it now."
"But Barnabas never injured you," said Meg, with a feminine begging of the point that brought an unmirthful smile to George's lips.
It was a hard fate that would not allow him to strike his enemy without wounding her. He hated this scene, and he hated his own weakness in hating it.
"You told me that you believed me; and indeed you must know that I am speaking the truth," she cried earnestly, with that instinctive feeling, that we most of us have, of the overpowering force of any fact that we thoroughly believe. "Barnabas could never strike a blow from behind. If you don't know that yourself, believe me for I do know him. Do you think I should be here now if I thought him guilty?"
"I have implicit faith in your word, which is more than I'd say of most men or of any other woman of my acquaintance," said George. "Since you say so, I am certain that you believe him innocent. I don't think that you could lie in any circumstances, certainly not well enough to carry conviction; but—I might say, consequently—you must pardon me if I can't pretend to equal faith in your judgment."
"My judgment is often wrong," she cried. "And yet, for that very reason, you may believe when I say I know him. Who do you think has ever had such cause to know him as I have had? I, who was his wife in name before I understood what love and marriage meant; who threw up everything at his bidding, and lived to recognise that he was not infallible?"
And George was silent. The boldness of this avowal surprised him. Meg, from their first acquaintance, had surprised him at times.
"We made a mistake," she said. "If Barnabas had been one shade less than utterly honest, it would have been an irretrievable mistake." She was thinking of a past despair, of which this man knew nothing, of black depths of water and a wind-swept marsh, and the thought gave her strength now. "You think that I believe in the preacher because I love him? It is not so, for I did not love him. I know that he is honest. What do you suppose would have become of me if he had not been good?" she cried with a shudder. "Should not I have had cause enough to know that?"
And Mr. Sauls felt the force of that shudder.