The man said nothing. The woman thought: "If he prevents me now, I shall—I must do it later. He can't change me. If he gives me in charge he can't prove it. I've done nothing yet."
Yet she looked again, and this time did not turn away.
A strange magnetism which seemed to run through her, projected from those eyes, was making even her finger-tips tingle as with a new sensation, and one she had never known before. Her purpose melted and dissolved in that flow of more than electric influence; it changed as fire changes a material thing. It melted like snow before the radiant energy of the sun.
Slowly she unwrapped the bundle. The paper, the cloth wrappings she threw into the black and oily water, but the child she clasped to her breast.
"My baby," she murmured, very quietly, but in tones that pierced the tense atmosphere and reached Joseph's ear. "I bore you in shame, and was about to kill you to save you from shame like mine; but I will bear my cross and love you for the sake of Jesus. Amen."
She stole away, trembling. There was a great fear and wonder at her heart, and the watcher saw no more.
Joseph smiled bitterly. His brain seemed some detached thing, a theatre upon the stage of which wild thoughts were the conflicting actors and his sub-conscious intelligence the spectator.
The simile of the shadow returned to him, and was it not all a shadow—this dark, unhappy life of his? The words "radiant energy," the words "God" "conscious force" danced before him. The whole sentient world was reeling—the blood that fed the grey matter of his brain was poor and thin—this was the reason.
Yet, was it the reason, after all? What had happened to him in the last few minutes? He felt as he had never in his whole life felt before. There was a sense of extraordinary impotence. Something had come into him; something had gone out of him.
No!—something had gone through him—that was the way to describe it to himself....