"Rose cannot love that demon," exclaimed Bidiane.
"No, she does not love him, but she understands what you will understand when you are older,—the awful sacredness of the marriage tie. Think of one of the sentences that she read to us last Sunday from Thomas à Kempis: 'A pure heart penetrates heaven and hell.' She has been in a hell of suffering herself. I think when in it she wished her husband were dead. Her charity is therefore infinite towards him. Her sins of thought are equal in her chastened mind to his sins of body."
"But you will not let her go away with him?"
"She will not wish to go, my treasure. She talks to him, and repent, repent, is, I am sure, the burden of her cry. You do not understand that under her gentleness is a stern resolve. She will be soft and kind, yet she would die rather than live with Charlitte or surrender her child to him."
"But he may wish to stay here," faltered Bidiane.
"He will not stay with her, chérie. She is no longer a girl, but a woman. She is not resentful, yet Charlitte has sinned deeply against her, and she remembers,—and now I must return to her. Charlitte has little delicacy of feeling, and may stay too long."
"Wait a minute, Agapit,—is it her money that he is after?"
"No, little one, he is not mercenary. He would not take money from a woman. He also would not give her any unless she begged him to do so. I think that his visit is a mere caprice that, however, if humored, would degenerate into a carrying away of Rose,—and now au revoir."
Bidiane, in her excited, overstrained condition of mind, bestowed one of her infrequent caresses on him, and Agapit, in mingled surprise and gratification, found a pair of loving arms flung around his neck, and heard a frantic whisper: "If you ever do anything bad, I shall kill you; but you will not, for you are good."