Susan Stoddard here interpolated a stern "Don't you know?"
"Listen, Mrs. Stoddard!" cried Agatha in desperation. "When the yacht, the Jeanne D'Arc, began to sink, there was panic and fear everywhere. While I was climbing down into one of the smaller boats, the rope broke, and I fell into the water. I should have drowned, then and there, if it had not been for this man; for all the rest of the ship's load jumped into the boats and rowed away to save themselves. He helped me to come ashore, after I had become exhausted by swimming. He is ill and near to death, because he risked his life to save mine. Is not that a heaven-inspired act?"
Mrs. Stoddard's eyes glistened at Agatha's tale, which had at last got behind the older woman's armor. But her next attack took a form that Agatha had not foreseen. In her reverent voice, so suited to exhortation, she demanded:
"And what will you do with your life, now that you have been saved by the hand of God? Will you dedicate it to Him, whose child you are?"
Agatha, chafing in her heart, paused a moment before she answered:
"My life has not been without its tests of faith and of conscience, Mrs. Stoddard; and who of us does not wish, with the deepest yearning, to know the right and to do it?"
"Knowledge comes from the Lord," came Mrs. Stoddard's words, like an antiphonal response in the litany.
"My way has been different from yours; and It is a way that would be difficult for you to understand, possibly. But you shall not condemn me without reason."
"Are you going to marry that man you have been living with these many days?" was the next stern inquiry.
A stinging blush—a blush of anger and outraged pride as much as of modesty—surged up over Agatha's face. She was silent a moment, and in that moment learned what it was to control anger.