"We shall not be together. I go away, alone, to-morrow."
He knew that her eyes were then, very slowly, searching his face. She said, gently, after a moment's pause, "Tell me, Olva, what you mean. Of course we are going together."
"Oh, it is so hard for me!" He was fighting now as he had never fought. Why not, even at this last moment, in spite of yesterday, defy God and stay with her and keep her? In that moment of hesitation he suffered so that the sweat came to his forehead and his eyes were filled with pain and then were suddenly tired and dull.
But he came out, and seemed now to stand above the room and look down on his body and her body and to be filled with a great pity for them both.
"Margaret dear, it's very hard for me to tell you. Will you be patient with me and let me put things as clearly as I can—as I see them?"
She burst out, "Olva, you mustn't leave me, I—-" Then she used all her strength to bring control. Very quietly she ended—"Yes, Olva, tell me everything."
"It is so difficult because it is about God, and we all of us feel, and rightly I expect, that it is priggish to talk about God at all. And then I don't know whether I can give you everything as it happened because it was all so unsubstantial and at the end of it any one might say 'But this is nothing—nothing at all. You've been hysterical, nervous—that's the meaning of it. You've nothing to show.' And yet if all the world were to say that to me I should still have no doubt. I know, as I know that we are sitting here, as I know that I love you, that what I say is true."
She brought her chair close to him and then put her band in his and waited.
"After I had killed Carfax—after his body had fallen and the wood was very silent, I was suddenly conscious of God. I can't explain that better. I can only say that I knew that some one had watched me, I knew that the world would never be the same place again because some one had watched me, and I knew that it was not because I had done wrong, but because I had put myself into a new set of conditions that life would be different now. I knew these things, and I went back to College.
"I had never thought about God before, never at all. I had been entirely heathen. Now I was sure of His existence in the way that one is sure of wood when one touches it or water when one drinks it.