"Why did He do this to me, if He's what you say He is?"
"I'm not sure that He did, old man! I think perhaps you and I had a hand in it!"
Tennelly looked at him keenly for an instant and turned away, silent. "I know what you mean," he said. "You told me I'd go through hell, and I have. I knew it in a way myself, but I'm afraid I'd do it again! I loved her! God! I'm afraid—I love her yet! Man! You don't know what an ache such love is."
"Yes, I do," said Courtland, with a sudden light in his face, but Tennelly was not heeding him.
"It isn't entirely that I've lost her; that I've got to give up hoping that she'll some time care and settle down to knowing she is gone forever! It's the way she went! The—the—the disgrace! The humiliation! The awfulness of the way she went! We've never had anything like that in our family. And to think my baby has got to grow up to know that shame! To know that her mother was a disgraceful woman! That I gave her a mother like that!"
"Now, look here, Tennelly! You didn't know! You thought she would be all right when you were married!"
"But I did know!" wailed Tennelly. "I knew in my soul! I think I knew when I first saw her, and that was why I worried about you when you used to go and see her. I knew she wasn't the woman for you. But, blamed fool that I was! I thought I was more of a man of the world, and would be able to hold her! No, I didn't, either, for I knew it was like trying to enjoy a sound sleep in a powder-magazine with a pocketful of matches, to trust my love to her! But I did it, anyway! I dared trouble! And my little child has got to suffer for it!"
"Your little child will perhaps be better for it!"
"I can't see it that way!"
"You don't have to. If God does, isn't that enough?"