“I wanted to say to you,” she said, dropping a hand on his shoulder, “that I do not blame you for anything—not for anything. Yet I want you to be sorry too. I want you to feel as sorry for me as I feel sorry for you.”
“I am the worst man and you the best woman in the world.”
She leaned over him with tears in her eyes. “Hush!” she said. “I want to help you—Charles. You are wise. You know ten thousand things more than I; but I know one thing you do not understand.”
“You know and do whatever is good,” he said brokenly.
“Oh, no, no, no! But I know one thing, because I have been taught, and because it was born with me. Perhaps much was habit with me in the past, but now I know that one thing is true. It is God.”
She paused. “I have learned so much since—since then.”
He looked up with a groan, and put a finger on her lips. “You are feeling bitterly sorry for me,” she said. “But you must let me speak—that is all I ask. It is all love asks. I cannot bear that you should not share my thoughts. That is the thing that has hurt—hurt so all these months, these long hard months, when I could not see you, and did not know why I could not. Don’t shake so, please! Hear me to the end, and we shall both be the better after. I felt it all so cruelly, because I did not—and I do not—understand. I rebelled, but not against you. I rebelled against myself, against what you called Fate. Fate is one’s self, what one brings on one’s self. But I had faith in you—always—always, even when I thought I hated you.”
“Ah, hate me! Hate me! It is your loving that cuts me to the quick,” he said. “You have the magnanimity of God.”
Her eyes leapt up. “‘Of God’—you believe in God!” she said eagerly. “God is God to you? He is the one thing that has come out of all this to me.” She reached out her hand and took her Bible from a table. “Read that to yourself,” she said, and, opening the Book, pointed to a passage. He read it:
And they heard the voice of the Lord God walking in the garden in
the cool of the day: and Adam and his wife hid themselves from the
presence of the Lord God amongst the trees of the garden.
And the Lord God called unto Adam, and said unto him, Where art
thou?
And he said, I heard Thy voice in the garden, and I was afraid,
because I was naked; and I hid myself.
And He said, Who told thee that thou wart naked? Hast thou eaten of
the tree whereof I commanded thee that thou shouldest not eat?