“Molly, you must be still—Betty sent me word that you were ill—and I have come.”
She lay, her eyes closed, her hand in the big protecting hand of the great-hearted man who sat beside her; lay so quietly there that he thought she slept.
After awhile she turned to him and spoke:
“I have lain here, panic-stricken, doomed, wholly terrified, alone—in my ears the sound of the worm’s nibble eating through the dull wood of the narrow confining coffin—I have smelt corruption—I have died many times—discarded—a rejected thing—flung into an unwept grave——”
“Hush, Molly——”
“Tush,” said she, “it is finished. I do not even fear to recall it. It’s but a ghost’s walk seen by daylight—a ridicule that in the night was a tragedy. Now there comes to me the fragrance of flowers. I am in the arms of the sweet brown earth. I rise through sap and root and stem and blossom of the dear plants to become life again, and a part of the sweet exhalation of eternity. My heart’s blood leaps within me—I am glad.... Your voice fills my ears, dear heart—if God’s be only as exquisite!... Yours and Betty’s and this tender Babette’s—the voices of them that I love are the refrain of an eternal hymn to me.”
“Molly”—he knelt beside her—“I am glad then that I have come.”
She ran her slender fingers over his hands with loving touch:
“I have been polluted,” she said. “They whispered, with evil satyr eyes upon me, of what they called Love—and I had so little a while to live—and I went. They stripped me naked, body and soul, and took me furtively down the mean ways of adultery.... Oh, it was such shabby, shabby sin!”