“Why—because you’ve beaten me—you with your sweetness and courage and tolerance. You’ve taught me that retribution and punishment are best left in—more merciful Hands than ours.”
Gillian’s hand went out to meet his.
“Oh, Dan, I’m so glad!” she said simply.
He kept her hand in his a moment, then released it gently.
“Well, you can tell her now,” he said awkwardly.
“I?” Gillian smiled a little. “No. I want you to tell her. Don’t you see, Dan”—as she sensed his impulse to refuse—“it will make all the difference in Magda if you and she are—are square with each other? She’s overweighted. She’s been carrying a bigger burden than she can bear. Michael comes first, of course, but there’s been her treatment of you, as well. June, too. And—and other things. And it’s crushing her. . . . No, you must tell her.”
“I will—if you say I must. But she won’t forgive me easily.”
“I think she will. I think she’ll understand just what made you do it. So now we’ll go back to Friars’ Holm together.”
An hour later Storran came slowly downstairs from the little room where he and Magda had met again for the first time since that moonlight night at Stockleigh—met, not as lovers, but as a man and woman who have each sinned and each learned, out of their sinning, how to pardon and forgive.
Storran was very quiet and grave when presently he found himself alone with Gillian.