“Most reverend sir, I knew it.”
“You know it now!”
“Pardon me, I have known it all along.”
“You may have guessed something, but not all. I loved your wife. You were unworthy of her. I sought to win her from you, and I succeeded—yes, for she hated you, and loved me. God was on my side, for you were an unbeliever, a blasphemer. I tried to make her leave the shelter of your roof for mine. She was my first love. I tried, do you hear, day and night, to make her my own—my own in this world, and in the next.” Again that calm reply—
“Most sainted sir, I knew it.”
“And I tell you, I succeeded. She loved me. She would have followed me to the world’s end. This house was hell to her, because you had no religion. Her soul was mine.”
“And now?” said the other coldly. “And now, most holy and reverend sir?”
“And now, though she has passed away in her beauty and her holiness, I love her still. She is dead, and I shall die. In heaven, at least, we shall be together!”
“Are you so sure that she is there?” said Haldane, still very calmly. “Are you so sure that you will follow her? I am not so sure. If there be the heaven you speak of, it was never made for the guilty. The door of your paradise is wide, but it is too narrow, I have heard, for the sinner who dies without repentance.”
“The sinner? Who is the sinner?”