“Why?”
“She was married.”
Mary threw him a startled look and he went on evenly:
“I could have used my power over mind and body to separate her from her husband. I confess that I was tempted. But there was a child. Their union had been sealed with the strongest tie that can bind two human beings. I have never allowed her to realize that she might love me. Had I chosen to break the silence between us I could have revealed this to her, taken her and torn her from the man to whom she had borne a babe. I had no right to commit that crime, no matter how deep the love that cried for its own. Marriage is based on the period of infancy of the child which spans the maternal life of woman. God had joined these two people together and no man had the right to put them asunder!”
“And you gave her up?”
“I had to, little mother. On the recognition of this eternal law the whole structure of our civilization rests.”
Mary bent her gaze steadily on his face for a moment in silence.
“And you are telling me that I should be reconciled to the man who choked me into insensibility?”
“I am telling you that he is the father of your son—that he has rights which you cannot deny; that when you gave yourself to him in the first impulse of love a deed was done which Almighty God can never undo. Your tragic blunder was the rush into marriage with a man about whose character you knew so little. It's the timid, shrinking, home-loving girl that makes this mistake. You must face it now. You are responsible as deeply and truly as the man who married you. That he happened at that moment to be a brute and a criminal is no more his fault than yours. It was YOUR business to KNOW before you made him the father of your child.”
“I tried to appeal to his better nature that awful night,” Mary interrupted, “but he only laughed at me!”