No murmur escaped her lips against the man who had forsaken her. The village knew her shame, but it could not fathom her secret. Myron Holder was deaf to all commands, entreaties, persuasions, sneers. Her face, holy with the divine shadow of coming maternity, turned to her questioners an indecipherable page—writ large with characters of shame and sorrow, but telling naught else.
* * * * * *
There came a night when Myron Holder descended into that hell of suffering called child-birth—struggled with prolonged agony—helpless and alone—and cried aloud—to that dead father—to that unknown mother—to God—for Death.
Myron Holder was a woman and had come to years of knowledge, and her fall was doubtless a sin and a shame to her—black and unforgivable; but far as Myron Holder had fallen, deep as was her humiliation, black as was her shame, inexcusable her error, she still shines in effulgent whiteness when compared with those women who refused her aid that long night through, demanding as recompense for their ministering the betrayal of her betrayer. Myron Holder would not pay their price.
The dim gray dawn lighted the pain-scarred face of a sleeping mother, by whose side reposed a fair-haired child; a child the secret of whose parentage was still locked within its mother's heart.
* * * * * *
"Them kind always lives," Mrs. Warner said to her husband, when, on a June morning, she saw Myron Holder totter past her door. Mrs. Warner should have thanked the God she worshipped, fasting, that it was so: had Myron Holder died, no woman in all Jamestown would have been free from blood-guiltiness. They had beheld a woman in such extremity as moved the hearts of Inquisitors, stayed the torch of persecution, shackled the relentless rack, deferred the vengeance of the law, and had withheld their hands from helping.
Those same hands which wrought garments for the heathen and shamed not to offer their alms to God!