"I have told her," he said presently, in a broken voice. "You are kind, Sanderson, very kind. God help us!"
"What has God to do with it?" fell a voice behind them. Harry faced about. It was Jessica, as he had first seen her in the upper room, with the bandage across her eyes.
"What has God to do with it?" she repeated, in a hard tone. "Perhaps Mr. Sanderson can tell us. It is in his line!"
"Please—" said Harry.
He could not have told what he would have asked, though the accent was almost one of entreaty. The harsh satire touched his sacred calling; coming from her lips it affronted at once his religious instinct and his awakened love. It was all he said, for he stopped suddenly at sight of her face, pain-frosted, white as the folded cloth.
"Oh," she said, turning toward the voice, "I remember what you said that night, right here in this very room—that you sowed your wild oats at college with Hugh—that they were 'a tidy crop'! You were strong, and he was weak. You led, and he followed. You were 'Satan Sanderson,' Abbot of The Saints, the set in which he learned gambling. Why, it was in your rooms that he played his first game of poker—he told me so himself! And now he has gone to be an outcast, and you stand in the pulpit in a cassock, you, the 'Reverend Henry Sanderson'! You helped to make him what he has become! Can you undo it?"
Harry was looking at her with a stricken countenance. He had no answer ready. The wave of confusion that had submerged him when he had restored the bandage to her eyes had again welled over him. He stood shocked and confounded. His hand fumbled at his lapel, and the white carnation, crushed by his fingers, dropped at his feet.
"I am not excusing Hugh now," she went on wildly. "He has gone beyond excuse or forgiveness. He is as dead to me as though I had never known him, though the word you spoke an hour ago made me his wife. I shall have that to remember all my life—that, and the one moment I had waited for so long, for my first sight of his face, and my bride's kiss! I must carry it with me always. I can never wipe that face from my brain, or the sting of that kiss from my lips—the kiss of a forger—of my husband!"
The old man groaned. "I didn't know he had seen her!" he said helplessly. "Jessica, Hugh's sin is not Sanderson's fault!"