Durgan obediently went out, and walked a few minutes with Bertha in the further shadow of the garden.
"Why did you say it?" she asked. "How could you talk of it being good to kill anyone?"
"My child!" he exclaimed, and then, more calmly, "you know well what I meant. We all know perfectly that there is a leprosy of soul as well as of body, for which on this side death we see no cure, of which even God must see that the world would be well rid. We cannot act on our belief; we leave it in His hands."
"Don't say it! Don't even hint at such a thing again!" In a moment she exclaimed, in a voice of tears, "What does God care? Ah me! when I look back and see my childhood—such high hope, such trustful prayer! Who gave that heart of hope but the God of whom you speak? Who taught the little soul the courage to trust and pray? And the hope is dead, the courage crushed, the prayers—may my worst enemy be saved from such answer, if answer there is, to prayer!"
She leaned her head against a tree, sobbing bitterly.
He supposed that 'Dolphus, bringing memories of a previous time, had unnerved her.
"You had a happy childhood." He spoke soothingly, hardly with interrogation.
She looked up fiercely. "You call God a father! It was my father who taught me to pray. He—ah! you cannot think how beautiful he was, how loving, how fond of all beautiful things! He taught me to pray for him. He said that he could not pray for himself—that he had no faith. I knelt by his knee every day, and prayed, as he taught me, for him and for sister and for myself, but most of all for him. Then Hermie became religious—dear, gentle, self-denying sister—and I cannot doubt that she spent half her time in prayer for him because he wasn't converted."
"And he died?" asked Durgan.
"Yes; he died." It seemed to him that she shuddered.