"Wrong, Miss Clairville?"
"Improper, I mean. Even here there are the convenances, the proprieties."
"Proprieties! When we are talking of our immortal souls and of our hopes of salvation! When truth is at stake, your character, your future perhaps—think if that had been told to anyone else!" he exclaimed half to himself.
"Then you will come?" Miss Clairville's tone was full of a radiant incredulity. She leant still farther towards him, and her eyes burned into the surrounding darkness of the night.
"I will come at once. I—if I meet anyone I can say that I am calling on you to hear about your brother."
She smiled, then frowned, in the dark. Would it be her lot to teach a good man subtlety? Should she tell the truth? She had not long to wait or think about it, for in five minutes Ringfield was knocking at her door. Nothing subtle as yet looked forth from his earnest eyes, and the grasp with which he took and held her hand was that of the pastor rather than that of the lover, but the night was dark and heavily warm, and although there were stars in the sky he did not look at them. Jupiter was just rising, giving a large mellow light like a house lamp, round and strong, and casting a shadow, but the fall of a sable lock on Miss Clairville's white neck was already more to him. They were soon seated side by side on the balcony. She had regained something other usual manner.
"You must not think that I am ungrateful for your interest in me," she said. "I believe that you are a good man, a Christian I suppose you call yourself, outside and above all creed, all ritual, the first I have ever met. No, I am not forgetting Father Rielle. He did the best he could for me, and Henry and others, but I could never follow the rules of the Romish Church, although born and bred a Catholic. With grand music one might stay in that communion, but not as our service is rendered here. And then, the confession! That is all right when you have nothing to confess, but not for me! Oh—Mr. Ringfield, why is it I cannot confess to Father Rielle, but that I can or could to you?"
"Then that story is true?"
"What was the story? What did he say?"
They talked now in whispers, and Ringfield told her in four short and to him abhorrent words. "He said—you were his wife."