"Surely," he answered.
"You do not know me; you cannot tell. If you knew"——
"Whosoever will," he replied, with steady emphasis. And in his heart he marvelled at the humbleness of this woman, whose candid brow and clear eyes bespoke her life.
Then, the man mingling with the priest in him, he continued, still more gently:
"The message is even to the greatest sinner. To see you is to know you have the right of one of the least."
She put up two hands, clasped in miserable deprecation; her cheeks flamed red an instant, then paled to a ghastly white; she turned silently, and swiftly went down two steps of the broad entrance stair; then pausing and looking back at him with a gaze such as one might fix upon the flames before he steps into them, she said clearly:
"Ask Mrs. Deans who Myron Holder is!" She slipped away, the gloom of the unlighted street absorbing her figure, as though it gathered to itself its righteous belonging.
CHAPTER XXI.
"We are the voices of the wandering wind,
Which seek for quiet, and quiet can never find.
Lo! as the wind is, so is mortal life—
A moan, a sob, a sigh, a storm, a strife."