There is utter silence. She is quiet always, in pain or pleasure. He sees only her small hands clasping each other close, and her violet eyes—those unerring indices of her feelings—growing dusk black under the lashes. But something in the curve of her firm lip does not satisfy him. He feebly lifts his hand to touch hers.
"You will not be hard and unforgiving? It is not like Grace Winans to be that. Promise me that you will forgive him freely! If he acted wrongly he has suffered for it. It is so easy to go wrong—to err is human, you know."
No wavering in that sternly curved red lip shows acquiescence. His voice rises higher, with a throb of pain in it:
"'If ye forgive not men their trespasses how shall my Father which is in heaven forgive you?' Gracie, say 'I promise.'"
All the sudden hot anger against the husband she had loved—the husband who had wronged her, and left desolate the sweetest years of her life—fades out of her heart. The words falter as hollowly from her lips as from his:
"I promise."
"Thanks. May God bless you—and—and make all your future years happy ones. Mother—call mother, please."
She puts a little cordial to the panting lips and tearfully obeys.
On her knees at the other side of the bed the anguished mother listens to the tender message to the absent sister, the soft words of comfort, the low farewell. With the last kiss of her son on her lips she buries her face speechlessly in his pillow.