“I have never doubted that.”
There was a pause of some minutes after this. The two women sat in silence looking at the fire, which had burned red and hollow since Franz had last attended to it. Mildred sat with her head leaning against her aunt’s shoulder, her hand clasping her aunt’s hand. Miss Fausset sat erect as a dart, looking steadily at the fire, her lips compressed and resolute, the image of unfaltering purpose.
“And now, Mildred,” she began at last, in those measured accents which Mildred remembered in her childhood as an association of awe, “take an old woman’s advice, and profit by an old woman’s experience of life if you can. Put this suspicion of yours on one side—forget it as if it had never been, and go back to your good and faithful husband. This suspicion of yours is but a suspicion at most, founded on the jealous fancy of one of the most fanciful women I ever knew. Why should George Greswold’s life be made desolate because your mother was a bundle of nerves? Forget all you have ever thought about that orphan girl, and go back to your duty as a wife.”
Mildred started away from her aunt, and left the sofa as if she had suddenly discovered herself in contact with the Evil One.
“Aunt, you astound, you horrify me!” she exclaimed. “Can you be so false to the conduct and principles of your whole life—can you put duty to a husband before duty to God? Have I not sworn to honour Him with all my heart, with all my strength; and am I to yield to the weak counsel of my heart, which would put my love of the creature above my honour of the Creator? Would you counsel me to persist in an unholy union—you whose life has been given up to the service of God—you who have put His service far above all earthly affections; you who have shown yourself so strong: can you counsel me to be so weak: and to let my love—my fond true love for my dear one—conquer my knowledge of the right? Who knows if my darling’s death may not have been God’s judgment upon iniquity—God’s judgment—”
She had burst into sudden tears at the mention of her husband’s name, with all that tenderness his image evolved; but at that word judgment she stopped abruptly with a half-hysterical cry, as a vision of the past flashed into her mind.
She remembered the afternoon of the return to Enderby, and how her husband had knelt by his daughter’s grave, believing himself alone, and how there had come up from that prostrate figure a bitter cry:
“Judgment! judgment!”
Did he know? Was that the remorseful ejaculation of one who knew himself a deliberate sinner?
Miss Fausset endured this storm of reproof without a word. She never altered her attitude, or wavered in her quiet contemplation of the fading fire. She waited while Mildred paced up and down the room in a tempest of passionate feeling, and then she said, even more quietly than she had spoken before,