“Whatever you may say, there’s no blinking facts, and you know as well as I do what are the facts that face you to-day,” he said, shaking a vehement fist, not as if threatening her, but only to give emphasis to his words. “The facts are, first, that you are the lawful wife of Marcus Blaydon, and secondly, that you are not the lawful wife of John Wingfield, and that if you persist in living with him you are his mistress.”
She opened the door this time, but not vehemently.
“Go away,” she said, “go away. I might as well have kept silent. I shall work out my own salvation in the face of your opposition and the opposition of the world.”
“Your salvation? Woman, it is your own damnation that you are working out in this house—this house of sin!”
He took a few steps toward the door and then wheeled round.
“One more chance I give you,” he said. “Come with me now, and you will only be asked to resume your former life. I will not insist on your joining your husband—only come away from this house.”
“Go away, go away,” she said, without so much as glancing at him.
Only one moment longer did he stay—just long enough to say:
“May God forgive you, Priscilla.”
He contrived, as so many pious people can in saying those words, to utter them as if they were a curse. They sounded in her ears exactly as a curse would have sounded.