The cruelty of it filled him even now with shamed pain.
"It was not I who did it," he said to himself "I did not understand."
And a bandage was removed from his eyes, and he looked down, as we look into still water, and he saw that Fay did not understand either. She had put out her hand to take him. She had pulled his wings off him. She had cast him aside. Perhaps she even felt horror of him now. But nevertheless she had not done it on purpose, any more than he had done it on purpose to that other poor creature of God. She did not understand.
Her fair, sweet face, which he had shuddered at as at a leper's, came back to him, smiling at him with a soft reproach. Ah! It was a child's face. That was the secret of it all. That was one of the reasons why he had so worshipped it, that dear face. She had not meant to hurt him with her pretty hand.
Later on, some day, not in this world perhaps, but some far-off day she would come to herself, and, looking back, she would feel as he felt now at the recollection of his infant cruelty, only a thousand times more deeply. He hoped to God he might be near her when that time of grief came, to comfort her, to assure her that the pain she had inflicted had been nothing, nothing, that it did not hurt.
An overwhelming, healing compassion, such as he had never known in all the years of his great tenderness for Fay, welled up within his arid heart.
Michael's racked soul was steeped in a great peace and light!
Time and time again his love for Fay had been wounded nearly to the death, and had been flung back bleeding upon himself. He had always enfolded it, and withdrawn it, and cherished it anew in a safer place.
A love that has been thus withdrawn and protected does not die. It shrinks home into the heart, that is all. Like a frightened child against its mother, it presses close and closer against the Divine Love that dwells within us, which gave it birth. At last the mother smiles, and takes her foolish weeping child, born from her body, which has had strength from her to wander away from her—back into her arms.