“You are taking an entirely wrong view, you are prejudiced. Because you don’t like me you blame me whether I am right or wrong.”
“You don’t know the difference between right and wrong.”
“I wasn’t going to have my patient upset,” he said obstinately.
“Gabriel, listen to me, hear me. Don’t be so angry with Peter. I wanted the woman paid to keep quiet. I insisted upon her being paid.” And then under her breath she said, “There is such a little time more.”
“There is all our lives,” Gabriel answered in that deep outraged voice. “All our lives it will be a stain that money was paid. As if we had something to conceal.”
His point of view was not theirs, neither Peter’s nor Margaret’s. They argued and protested, justifying themselves and each other. But it seemed to Gabriel there was no argument. When Margaret pleaded he had to listen, to hold himself in hand, to say as little as possible. Toward Peter Kennedy he was irreconcilable. “A man ought to have known,” he said doggedly.
“He wanted to ward off an attack.”
Dr. Kennedy went away ultimately, he had that amount of sense. By this time he was at least as antagonistic to Gabriel Stanton as Gabriel to him.
“Stiff-necked blighter! He’d talk ethics if she were dying. What does it matter whether it was right or wrong? Anyway, I got rid of the woman for her, set her mind at rest. I bet my way was as good as any he’d have found! Now I suppose he’ll argue her round until she looks upon me as the villain of the play.” In which, as the sequel shows, he wronged his lady love. “Insufferable prig!” And with that and a few more muttered epithets he went off to endure a hideous few days, fearing for her all the time, in the hands of such a man as Gabriel Stanton, whom he deemed hard and self-righteous.
But he need not have feared. The two men were poles apart in temperament, education, and environment. Circumstances aided in making them intolerant of each other. Their judgment was biased. Margaret saw them both more clearly than they saw each other. Her lover was the stronger, finer man, had the higher standard. And he was right, right this time, as always. Yet she thought sympathetically of the other and the weakness that led him to compromise. The Christian Scientist should not have been paid, she should have been prosecuted. Margaret saw it now,—she, too, had not seen it at the moment. She confessed herself a coward.