"And a pious old fool to boot!" said the Dean, impatiently. "But I am willing—like St. Paul and my betters—to be a fool for Christ's sake. Lady Tranmore, are you or are you not a Christian?"
"I hope so," she said, with composure, while her cheek flushed. "But our Lord did not ask impossibilities. He knew there were limits to human endurance—and human pardon—though there might be none to God's."
"'Be ye perfect, as your Father which is in heaven is perfect,'" cried the Dean. "Where are the limits there?"
"There are other duties in life besides that to a wife who has betrayed her husband," she said, steadily. "You ask of William what he has not the strength to give. His life was wrecked, and he has pieced it together again. And now he has given it to his country. That poor, guilty child has no claim upon it."
"But understand," said Ashe, interposing, with an energy that seemed to express the whole man—"while I live, everything—short of what you ask—that can be done to protect or ease her, shall be done. Tell her that."
His features worked painfully. The Dean took up his hat and stick.
"And may I tell her, too," he said, pausing—"that you forgive her?"
Ashe hesitated.
"I do not believe," he said, at last, "that she would attach any more meaning to that word than I do. She would think it unreal. What's done is done."
The Dean's heart leaped up in the typical Christian challenge to the fatal and the irrevocable. While life lasts the lost sheep can always be sought and found; and love, the mystical wine, can always be poured into the wounds of the soul, healing and recreating! But he said no more. He felt himself humiliated and defeated.