For her part, Jane Elin rang again and again on the surface of this emotion called love and listened with troubled ears to the hollow sounds within. Jane Elin had had just twenty-four hours in which to rejoice undisturbed in her new happiness. She was no idle sentimentalist, afraid to face the truth, or with rose-coloured glasses through which to look at the truth. Up to this point she had seen clearly the course of events and the ninepins fate had played with a question she believed finally settled. At last the widow was free, and Jane Elin was sober-thoughted at the new aspect that that fact put upon her relations to the minister. With both, despite the fact that Samson Jones was exceeding in devotion to each the highest expectation either could have held, intuition of something wrong about their lover made them keenly anxious.
On the Sunday after this week that Gelligaer will never forget, the minister, without a note of any kind on the desk or in his hand, preached a sermon of extraordinary power. And the old white-haired deacons sitting in a row around the pulpit nodded their heads approvingly, for it seemed to them that the good old times of fifty years ago were coming back, when all preaching in Wales was extemporaneous. Keturah alone looked with troubled face upon the minister, certain that a catastrophe was overtaking him, at the nature of which she had shrewdly guessed. And it was the Monday following this Sunday that the Reverend Samson Jones made a convulsive resolution to see Jane Elin and tell her all. He would send for her to come to his pastoral study; it would be easier to talk with her there. His action in sending for Jane Elin was like the action of the man who instinctively puts out his hand to shield his head from a blow, for Samson Jones saw the calamity coming upon him.
He stood with down-dropped eyes as she came into the study, fingering the objects on his writing-table.
Jane Elin went up to him swiftly. “What is it, Samson? Has anything happened? Do you need me?”
“Aye, I have been meaning this last week—it seemed only right—I don’t see how it is possible—I——”
“Och, tell me, Samson, tell me quickly, what is it?”
“Well, that day two weeks ago——”
“Dear, dear!” Jane Elin interjected, turning pale.
Samson Jones was thinking of an escape, any escape—this was too horrible, he could not continue with it—when his eye fell on a letter just received from his mother in answer to the one sent by the deacon’s wife, and the word “mother” flashed over his whole being like a great light revealing a path in the darkness. The joy in the freedom that came to him with this thought was almost too great for him to bear. His mother would help him.
“My mother,” he stammered, “my mother, och, it is too horrible!”