Hera pointed to a place on the wall where a fresco painting once had been. Fragments of a cornice carved in marble still clung about it; to the eye there was only a patch of blank wall.
“It was the portrait of Arvida, a woman of our race,” she said, regarding the spot and its remnant of frame thoughtfully. “At one time her tomb was here, under the picture.”
“And is in the chapel no longer?”
“No; they branded her a heretic and drove her to her grave, as our chronicles say; and still not satisfied, they disinterred her body and burned it in Milan.”
“How strange it all seems in this day,” he mused, “when one may think as he will about his soul without putting his body in peril before or after it has returned to the ground.”
“And yet,” she said, quickly, as if in an outburst of feeling long restrained, “there is still a power that persecutes—that takes the soul and enchains the body.”
“The power you mean is duty,” he said, positively, as one who understood.
“Yes,” she affirmed, eagerly, glad in the knowledge that he read her thought.
There was silence between them as they moved to a part of the chapel where a broad window looked out on the landscape of ploughed fields that stretched high into the rainy distance. When he spoke again it was in the tone of one who had come to a decision.
“The world’s cruelest wrongs have been committed in the name of duty,” he said. “Fortunately for the happiness of the race, we have cut loose from many ancient notions of obligation. The zealots who persecuted Arvida acted from a sense of duty. With new ideals of justice rise new conceptions of what we owe to others.”